Timeline for Non-descriptive gene nomenclature
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 17, 2016 at 19:31 | comment | added | WYSIWYG | @MuhammadKhan people have made effort to systematically name genes.. See an example in my answer below. But they do not make things easier.. It is easy for most people to remember a name rather than a random alphanumeric combination. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:08 | comment | added | Muhammad Khan | @AMR You're right in saying that the question boils down to something more of information theory rather than biology. I guess I'm just surprised that biologists and information theorists (or people at the intersection of these two) haven't made efforts toward this yet. For your chemical example, I know that names get cumbersome which is why names like acetyl co-A were invented, but at least there is a formal name one could analyze if need be. Gene names don't have "standard" names | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 19:00 | vote | accept | Muhammad Khan | ||
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:23 | comment | added | AMR | This is an example of a rather simple biomolecule, Acetyl Coenzyme-A, and its IUPAC name. S-[2-[3-[[(2R)-4-[[[(2R,3S,4R,5R)-5-(6-aminopurin-9-yl)-4-hydroxy-3-phosphonooxyoxolan-2-yl]methoxy-hydroxyphosphoryl]oxy-hydroxyphosphoryl]oxy-2-hydroxy-3,3-dimethylbutanoyl]amino]propanoylamino]ethyl] ethanethioate You can start to see the problems that biologists would face if they tried to adopt chemical nomenclature. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 18:17 | comment | added | AMR | @MuhammadKhan Biological macromolecules are hundreds to thousands of amino acids long Genes can be a few hundred to well over a million nucleotides long, and they are interrupted, meaning that there are long stretches, introns, that get spliced out of the mRNA that makes the protein. You are asking more of an information theory question in How can we compress the sequence into a form that is manageable but can be decompressed into the full sequence, and that would be difficult. Just take a look at the protein FASTA sequence for SELE and you will get an idea of the challenge. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 6:16 | comment | added | WYSIWYG | To add to this... there is a transposon in Drosophila called Baggins and a gene called Smaug.. Both these are characters from the novel -The Hobbit | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 2:18 | comment | added | Muhammad Khan | Thanks for the detailed answer! I wasn't suggesting that each gene by identified by its sequence because I know the lengths that we're talking about here. I was just hoping that a kind of "language" would be developed, where sequence could be conveyed in a few letters. I can't think of any good ideas off the top of my head, but let's look at a chemistry analogy: take for instance diethyl ketone. It would be cumbersome to specify an origin position and then provide coordinates for each atom. However, those 13 letters are enough to tell you it's (C2H5)2C=O. That's what I was talking about. | |
| Jan 16, 2016 at 1:54 | history | answered | Remi.b | CC BY-SA 3.0 |