“We consulted the respective research communities to discuss the proposed updates, and we also notified researchers who had published on these genes specifically when the changes were being put into effect,” says Bruford.Īs Bruford makes clear, the art of naming genes is very much driven by consensus. So far, the names of some 27 genes have been changed like this over the past year, Elspeth Bruford, the coordinator of HGNC, tells The Verge, but the guidelines themselves weren’t formally announced until this week. A record of old symbols and names will be stored by HGNC to avoid confusion in the future. That means the symbol MARCH1 has now become MARCHF1, while SEPT1 has become SEPTIN1, and so on. This week, the HGNC published new guidelines for gene naming, including for “symbols that affect data handling and retrieval.” From now on, they say, human genes and the proteins they expressed will be named with one eye on Excel’s auto-formatting. Help has arrived, though, in the form of the scientific body in charge of standardizing the names of genes, the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee, or HGNC. The end result is that while knowledgeable Excel users can avoid this problem, it’s easy for mistakes to be introduced. Or, another scientist might load the data without the correct formatting, changing gene symbols back into dates. Even then, a scientist might fix their data but export it as a CSV file without saving the formatting. Excel doesn’t offer the option to turn off this auto-formatting, and the only way to avoid it is to change the data type for individual columns. “During my PhD studies I did as well!” Examples of gene symbols being rendered as dates in Microsoft Excel. “It’s a widespread tool and if you are a bit computationally illiterate you will use it,” he says.
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Módos, whose job involves analyzing freshly sequenced genetic data, says Excel errors happen all the time, simply because the software is often the first thing to hand when scientists process numerical data. “It’s really, really annoying,” Dezső Módos, a systems biologist at the Quadram Institute in the UK, told The Verge. One study from 2016 examined genetic data shared alongside 3,597 published papers and found that roughly one-fifth had been affected by Excel errors. It’s also surprisingly widespread and affects even peer-reviewed scientific work. This is extremely frustrating, even dangerous, corrupting data that scientists have to sort through by hand to restore. Studies found a fifth of genetic data in papers was affected by Excel errors