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Scientific literature often mis-names genes and boffins say Microsoft Excel is partly to blame.
"Automatic conversion of gene symbols to dates and floating-point numbers is a problematic feature of Excel software," In a paper titled write Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren and Assam El-OstaEmai of the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Australia in a paper titled Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature .
Among the things Excel does to gene names include changing "SEPT2", the name of a gene thought to have a role in proper formation of cell structure, to the date "2-Sep". The "MARCH1" gene becomes "1-Mar".
The paper notes that this is a problem that's been know for over a decade, but one which remains pervasive. The trio studied 35,175 Excel tables attached to 3,597 scientific papers published between 2005 and 2015 and found errors in "987 supplementary files from 704 published articles. Of the selected journals, the proportion of published articles with Excel files containing gene lists that are affected by gene name errors is 19.6 per cent."
It's not hard to change the default format of Excel cell to avoid changes of this sort: you can get it done in a click or three. Much of the problem in these papers is therefore between scientists' ears, rather than within Excel itself. The paper's silent on why genetic scientists, who The Register will assume are not short of intelligence, have been making Excel errors for years.
This article focuses on errors resulting from auto-correction of gene names; certainly other subject areas have suffered from similarly 'helpful' software. What hilarious and/or cringe-worthy 'corrections' have YOU seen?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @11:53AM
I used it yesterday to edit a CSV file and it started shifting data into neighboring cells for no reason. No, I didn't report the bug. Fix your POS software, Microsoft.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @01:57PM
Probably line breaks and tabs in your data it is interpreting literally instead of cell data.
(Score: 1) by three_sheets on Friday August 26 2016, @05:10PM
No line breaks. Maybe tabs. It was saved as CSV from an XLS file.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Friday August 26 2016, @05:27PM
Or commas. I run into this all the time, where a program offers to save data into a CSV, where commas are in the data. Open it up and you end up with random cell shifts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 26 2016, @09:04PM
Yup. My jazz station uses MICROS~1's app (and inappropriate separator characters) to drive their Most Recently Played list [kkjz.org], so
Artist
Lambert, Hendricks, Ross
Becomes
Artist | Tune | Disk
Lambert | Hendricks | Ross
.
Not directly related, but amusing to me:
On their Most Recently Played list, my local Rock station (must be owned by Mormons or something) does funny things with the name of a Rolling Stones song. [archive.li]
Elton John's "The Bitch Is Back" gets a similar treatment as does the name of the band Moby Dick.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]