Re: How ancient whales lost their legs, got sleek and conquered the oceans

>>> "George Murphy" <gmurphy@raex.com> 05/26/06 10:02 AM >>>
Thanks to those who explained the origins of some gene names. A follow-up:
Is there any group in the genetics community that makes such names
"official," as there is in astronomy with asteroids, Kuiper belt objects
or in chemistry/physics with chemical elements?
Shalom
George
http://web.raex.com/~gmurphy/

I am writing this all off the top of my head, so some things may be wrong.

I am not aware of an official group that makes names standard for all organisms. As I recall the genes in Escherichia coli are fairly systematized and other researchers may get together and decide more or less officially for their favorite organism. Now with large scale sequencing and the ability to map genes much more easily than in the past, things are more likely to be more organized than they were some years ago. But a decade or more there were many systems with unidentified mutant genes in different systems of the same organism that had a long history. When I was involved with transcription factors, the fractions of the columns that had a certain activity were labelled A and then B and then C etc in the order the kinds of activity were eluted from a column. Thus you have TFB and TFD and TFH, etc. Some fractions did not work out, so for example there is no longer a TFC. Other fractions could be divided into two fractions after more work was done and you get TFXI and!
 TFXII, etc. Meanwhile some mutations in sucrose metabolism that researchers had been working on for decades called suc 1 and suc 2 turned out to be these same transcription factors. As I recall there was a third widely studied system that had different mutants that also turned out to be identical to these same transcription factors. So what do you do? The literature has these three different names used for last 20 years or so for different systems and now we know they are the same gene. You really cannot go back and change the literature. No group that has been using these names wants to give up their pet name. If you give the genes a new name different from the other three you create even greater confusion for neophytes trying to read the old literature. I think it turned out that the biological community essentially just voted by how the majority subsequently referred to the genes.

Al
Received on Fri May 26 14:08:37 2006