I had always thought that 'allele' simply meant a variant of a gene and thus could be used in the context of either asexual or sexual populations. With it only being slightly less useful as a concept in asex because of the lack of recombination and thus no reshuffling of allele among offspring. Recently, I was reading a paper that wrote:
In the asexual and sexual populations mentioned earlier, the implicit model space is simply a point in genotype frequency space or allele frequency space, respectively.
Suggesting that alleles should primarily be used in the context of sexual populations. Wikipedia gives a general definition consistent with both asex and sex use, but all examples listed are sexual.
Hence my terminology question:
Should I use the word 'allele' for variants of genes only in the case of sexual populations? Or is it alright to use 'allele' in populations of obligate asexuals?
I realize why recombination forces us to represent a whole population as allelic frequency instead of talking about individual genotypes, and why asex lets us focus on just the latter. In this question, I am not curious about this distinction, just the purely terminological question.