The phrase "a discrete unit of" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when referring to a specific, distinct part or element of a larger whole, often in contexts like science, mathematics, or data analysis.
Example: "In the study, each participant was considered a discrete unit of analysis, allowing for more accurate results."
Alternatives: "an individual component of" or "a distinct element of".
The inactive X chromosome (Xi) is a discrete unit of facultative heterochromatin that is selected for repression early in the development of female mammals as a means of equalizing X-linked gene dosage between the sexes1.
"In a little more than one hundred years, a gene — a discrete unit of heredity — has been transformed from a vague notion among a small group of scientists to almost a ubiquitous news item and consumer commodity," the authors write.
But the rapid efficiency of the formulations, the trite existential analogy ("Perhaps, he thought, that was the tragedy of life"), the boxing of potentially complex thinking into a discrete unit of speedy novelistic performance — all this has the effect of closing down the S.R.S.G. rather than opening him up.
Each agent uses the current state of their local environment and a simple set of rules to determine when to exchange blocks, each block representing a discrete unit of temperature change.
What united the Bright Young People and made them seem a discrete unit from the angle of the newspaper gossip column was not a shared political outlook or an economic standing, but what the society columnist Patrick Balfour called "a community of impulse".
In other words, it is necessary to consider both the thickness and the distance to the seam, within the context of the host rock, to accurately anticipate areas of elevated rupture-induced hazard; acknowledging the presence of a discrete unit within the overburden in general terms is an insufficient indicator of risk.
Many policymakers and educators have advocated integrating evolution throughout biology instruction so that evolution is not relegated to a discrete unit at the beginning or end of the course, but is accurately portrayed as woven throughout scientific thinking in all areas of biology (e.g., National Academy of Sciences 1998; Alles 2001).
In current practice, the preference is to take an act or discrete unit of an act and classify it as a similarly discrete unit of the Code.
Many of the EDC proteins are cross-linked together to form the cornified envelope, an essential and discrete unit of the mammalian skin barrier.
It is time we start conceiving of the urban as a realm that stretches far beyond the discrete unit of the city – smart or otherwise.
The critical path method (CPM), for example, treats all activities as discrete units - this is convenient for activities that are inherently discrete, but activities that are continuous in nature (such as the operation of a tunnel boring machine) must be converted into a series of discrete units of work.
