The Plant Cell, Vol. 13, 2391,
November 2001, Copyright © 2001,
American Society of Plant Biologists
Renaming Genes and Duplication of Gene Names in the Literature
Sheng Luan1,
Jörg Kudla2,
Klaus Harter3,
Wilhelm Gruissem4 and
Joanne Chory5
1 Department of Plant and Microbial Biology University of California Berkeley, CA 94720
2 Molekulare Botanik, Universität Ulm Albert-Einstein-Allee 11, 89069 Ulm, Germany
3 Institut für Biologie II Universität Freiburg Schänzlestr. 1, 79104 Freiburg, Germany
4 Institute of Plant Sciences Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zentrum, LFW E57.1, CH-8092 Zürich, Switzerland
5 Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Plant Biology Laboratory The Salk Institute 10010 N. Torrey Pines Rd. La Jolla, CA 92037
Arabidopsis has been used as a model system by many plant biologists. Completion of the genome sequence and the launch of the "2010 Program" will clearly attract even more researchers to study the function of essentially all genes in the Arabidopsis genome. As research expands on Arabidopsis biology, an increasing number of genes will be studied by more than one laboratory and each gene must bear a name. Scientific communication will be facilitated by a common nomenclature.
We have become concerned and confused by publications that duplicate gene nomenclature and rename already published genes. One such publication recently appeared in The Plant Cell and caused confusion of the existing nomenclature in previous work from our laboratories. Although the particular case encouraged us to write this letter, we find that similar problems affect other genes and publications and therefore become a general issue of naming genes in the biological literature. Thus, it is timely to implement mechanisms that will help improve the situation. We suggest the following steps to avoid confusing nomenclature caused by renaming and/or duplication of existing nomenclature. First, authors should consult the literature and other resources before naming a putative new gene. For Arabidopsis genes, one can look them up in the Arabidopsis Database (TAIR) and GenBank to see if the gene of interest has already been published under a particular name. The gene entries in the databases are always accompanied by the authors who submitted the genes, and publications are often (if not always) listed as well. Another resource is David Meinke's Web site that lists a number of acronyms that have already been assigned. Moreover, it would be of additional advantage for future database analyses and scientific communication if duplication of abbreviations assigned to entities from other organisms could also be avoided. We suggest that journals could implement mechanisms to avoid proliferation of this nomenclature problem. This could be achieved by including a nomenclature statement in the reviewer return form and by making it mandatory for the authors to state possible conflicts or confusions on their nomenclature in the cover letter. We hope that this author-reviewer-editor filtering system will help avoid the confusion caused by renaming published genes and duplicating already used names.
|
|
