Last week, Caroline Winter wrote about the peculiarities of capitalizing the personal pronoun in English ["Me, Myself, and I", 5 Aug 2008, NY Times].
Just like the debate over capitalization of internet, perhaps it’s time to begin referring to DNA in the lowercase. And the same goes for you too, RNA. DNA, after all, isn’t a proper noun. It’s not even a very representative acronym. Once you get the knack of it, muscle memory just melts away and is reformed. dna dna dna. Easy. And perhaps what we really need is a Web 2.0 style name. How about doxbo or dribo or druleic? I’m already all over GoDaddy. Don’t even think of squatting on my domains!
I say this half tongue-in-cheek, of course, but adoption of naming and formatting standards has been a huge boon for the biological sciences. Compare, for example, D. melanogaster and C. elegans genetics. I admit when I was a graduate student working in a C. elegans lab that I was incredibly jealous over the latitude that my fly counterparts had in choosing such whimsical names for their genes. But is freeform naming and formatting such a good idea?
The very detailed and carefully controlled nomenclature of the C. elegans field makes naming and referencing genes, IMHO, much easier. But it’s not just a naming scheme. It’s also about formatting and usage. These guidelines make it instantly apparent in a publication if one is referring to a gene, a locus, a protein product, a mutation, a strain, etc.
A generic usage guideline — an Elements Of Style for Biology — would go a long way towards easier sharing of research findings from one experimental niche to another.
