Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: developmental biology, science, sonic hedgehog, strange terms
A few months ago I wrote about the insanity of drosophila geneticists. Well, apparently I was right. NPR’s “All Things Considered” is doing a story about the crazy names.
The story airs later today and you can listen to it here.
The story description:
February 9 · Fruit Fly geneticists spend hours each day staring at flies under a microscope. And they want you to know they have their own ways of being geeky, like giving funny names to things. But is that a good thing for the study of genetics as it applies to humans?
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: developmental biology, insanity, science, sonic hedgehog, strange terms
Scientists Are Insane.
Some fields have more sanity than others; sadly, my field-Biology, seems to be the least sane. Our low sanity ranking is, in my opinion, almost completely the fault of developmental biologists-the Drosophila people. Zebrafish people are nuts too but just take a look at some of the names of genes found, and named, by developmental biologists:
- Sonic Hedgehog aka (shh)- yes, named after the little blue guy in the Sega Genesis game. The hedgehog family of genes (Desert Hedgehog and Indian Hedgehog are also members of the family) is really cool- they control the development of the brain, organs, fingers, vertebrae and other cool things that happen in early gestation. Unfortunately, mutations in Sonic Hedgehog cause severe brain malformations like mild Holoprosencephaly in which the brain doesn’t form properly leaving the child a brain that is divided (a good thing other forms of Holoprosencephaly don’t have any brain differentiation) but there are significant abnormalities that can cause seizures and other health issues. To see MRI images of mild Holoprosencephaly go here and here. A normal brain looks like this.
- Less well known is Pikachurin, a protein involved with vision. Pikachurin was named after Pikachu from Pokemon. Pokemon is weird enough we don’t need proteins named after it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikachurin
- Oh, Pokemon is also a gene; though its name has been changed because the gene causes cancer and the Pokemon people don’t want to be associated with cancer. Its new name is Zbtb7 which is kinda lame.
- One of my coworkers works with MIB1 and MIB2. I would have guessed that these were named after the Men In Black. This is not the case. MIB stands for “Mindbomb” even though it has nothing to do with minds or bombs.
- Moving away from developmental biology and into oncology we come upon Neuroblastoma Stage 4s. Stage 4 is usually very bad but the “s” stands for special. Babies with this type of neuroblastoma are often diagnosed at birth because of numerous blueish nodules under the infant’s skin that look like blueberries. These babies are often called “blueberry muffin babies” (incidentally, another condition, congenital rubella also causes blueberry muffin baby syndrome). Fortunately for the babies and their families, Neuroblastoma 4s often requires no or minimal chemotherapy and is associated with an 80 to 90% survival rate. [Source: G.A. Levitt, K.A. Platt, R. De Byrne, N. Sebire, C.M. Owens. "4S neuroblastoma: The long-term outcome" Pediatric Blood & Cancer vol 43, no 2 (2004).]
- You’ll have to wait until I can find the term I’m looking for. It may take a while.
