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posted by chromas on Friday August 07 2020, @04:20AM   Printer-friendly
from the ' dept.

Scientists rename genes because Microsoft Excel reads them as dates:

Microsoft Excel’s automatic formatting is normally helpful for finishing spreadsheets quickly, but it’s proving to be an agent of chaos for geneticists. The Verge has learned that the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee has issued guidelines for naming human genes to prevent Excel’s automatic date formatting from altering data. MARCH1 (Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1), for example, should now be labeled MARCHF1 to stop Excel from changing it to 1-Mar.

The names of 27 genes have been changed in the past year to avoid Excel-related errors, HGNC coordinator Elspeth Bruford said. This isn’t a rare error, either, as Excel had affected about a fifth of genetics-related papers examined in a 2016 study.

Journal Reference:
Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, Assam El-Osta. Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature [open], Genome Biology (DOI: 10.1186/s13059-016-1044-7)


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @07:13AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @07:13AM (#1032789)

    Gene names are IMHO a large clusterf*ck anyway. If you track gene names between different species they can differ. To complicate it even futher the same name can also indicate a different, related gene in that same other species.

    To illustrate:
    Species 1 has gene x and y
    Species 2 has gene x and z

    Gene x in species 1 is gene z in species 2
    Gene y in species 1 is gene x in species 2
    Species 3 has gene x and z, but are totally unrelated to the genes in species 1 and 2.

    In this case genes are considered similar if they encode a gene with the same protein function (and behaves the same) or have a comparable genetic markup (and are thus considered related).

    Disclamer: I've worked on research with such genes.

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  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday August 07 2020, @02:54PM (2 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Friday August 07 2020, @02:54PM (#1032919) Journal

    Yes, they're quite confused. There's probably no way to avoid it, though. It's better to think of them as nicknames than as names. They started off as "coded functional descriptors", but that was sort of iffy from the beginning. "eyeless" for a gene that was necessary to function correctly to create eyes...but not the only gene that needed to function correctly. And then they got abbreviated. So a gene got a name because of what you noticed broke when it broke...but that may have only indirect connection to it's most important use. And different species use the same gene in slightly (or grossly) different ways.

    It's probably better to think of a single gene as being the collection of alleles that are used within a species to handle a particular job. But the only real description of that is a set of gene sequences, and that's too bulky to be convenient. So genes are talked of using their nicknames, and you've got to expect a bunch of overlaps and alternatives, with different alternatives preferred in different contexts.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @07:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @07:58PM (#1033120)

      There's probably no way to avoid it, though.

      I prefer gene numbers, like it is done in Arabidopsis thaliana: AtG

      It's not perfect, but better than gene names (which are used textually in articles (and preferably not in data sets) as well, but are always referenced back to the gene number.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:17PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2020, @10:17PM (#1033204)

      I failed genetics because of that silliness. The teacher wasn't available to explain what the various traits we were supposed to be breeding for looked like and there wasn't any good pictures provided either. Even most of the other students didn't seem to know which fruit flies were in which containers and they certainly couldn't explain what to look for either. If you're a geneticist that's used to working with the species in question, that may be obvious, but trying to breed for those results without knowing what the traits look like is literally impossible based only on the name.