The article is so annoying! I am pretty damn sure excel doesn't intentionally have any gene-renaming features, nor even has any concept of gene. So what are the scientists doing? Forgetting to put quotes on some data that is gene-names, and having it interpretted as function names or dates or something?
Don't forget that the genomics folks also renamed a whole bunch of genes a few years ago so now there are two different names for the same thing floating around!
At the university I was working on a project to do parsing of gene relationships from literature. And yeah remember the inconsistencies. Also genes have funny names there is a SHH (Sonic Hedgehog), a DICER1 (which cuts something RNA or DNA I forgot), and a bunch of other silly ones.
Ultimately though coming from the world of algorithms and nicely organized data, it was frustrating how disorganized the nomenclature seemed.
Is the simple renaming of 27 genes a good solve? I think it is. Any time you expect people to be trained, you’re planning for failure. Even a trained person can make a mistake or forget to do the manual steps. This eliminates the possibility.
Would also say corrupting gene names, but in this case the scientists literally decided to rename genes to not conflict with Excel's treatment of date-like strings.
there was a time when a gene was named to facilitate search
through a bookshelf full of laboratory notes.
you could look at a genes lable and know exactly where to find reference to the gene, the lable would indicate the stack number the shelf, the section the volume the page[s] and paragraph....lables such as Sonichedgehog dont do that anymore.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27552985/ estimates that about one fifth of papers with supplementary Excel lists of genes contain mangled gene names. I remember talking about this problem back in 2003. The HGNC has been quietly going around changing the names of some of these genes to try and stop this from being a problem.
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