Tuyển tập các báo cáo nghiên cứu về y học được đăng trên tạp chí y học Minireview cung cấp cho các bạn kiến thức về ngành y đề tài: The success (or not) of HUGO nomenclature. | Correspondence The success or not of HUGO nomenclature Javier Tamames and Alfonso Valencia Address Instituto Cavanilles de Biodiversidad y Biologia Evolutiva Universidad de Valencia Apartado Postal 22085 46071 Valencia Spain. ỲCentro Nacional de Biotecnología - CSIC Avenida Darwin 3 28049 Cantoblanco Madrid Spain. Correspondence Javier Tamames. Email tamames@ Published 15 May 2006 Genome Biology 2006 7 402 doi gb-2006-7-5-402 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at http 2006 7 5 402 2006 BioMed Central Ltd Abstract Current usage of gene nomenclature is ambiguous and impairs the efficient handling of scientific information. Therefore it is important to propose guidelines to deal with this problem. This study attempts to evaluate the success of HUGO nomenclature for human genes. The results indicate that HUGO guidelines are not supported by the scientific community. Ambiguous gene names impose a serious hurdle for the analysis of a wide range of high-throughput data such as microarray experiments or protein-interaction maps. This sort of ambiguity also limits the efficiency of genome analysis and annotation and slows the implementation of automatic text-mining systems for using bibliographic information 1 2 . While systems for automatic gene name recognition in other domains such as in business or news reports perform very well the best systems in the biological field perform just slightly better than 80 3 . Genes are commonly named using functional terms such as insulin or tumor necrosis factor or symbols consisting of abbreviations such as INS for insulin or TNF for tumor necrosis factor. Functional names are usually unique in the sense that a given name refers only to one gene family even if not always to a single gene of the family. Ambiguity exists because often more than one functional name is used to refer to the same gene synonymy and also many functional names are descriptive .
