Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates (2020)

Re:Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreadi... by loufe on Monday April 11, 2022 @09:10AM (#30988148)

Good initiative, but there are hundreds of used languages, I hope they put a bit more effort into it than just testing the English dates cases. I caught one bad example, for any French speakers, in the article itself:

and MARS tweaked to MARS1.

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Re:Human genes renamed to stop Microsoft Excel from misreadi... by joshvm on Monday April 11, 2022 @10:09AM (#30988938)

Plenty of gene names are partial/full backronyms that don't really bear any relation to their function. For example the R in MARCH stands for "RING Finger", RING means "Really Interesting New Gene" [0]; finger here is some substructure that I guess looks superficially like a finger on the protein. That's an astronomy-worthy acronym if ever there was one. You could probably avoid a lot of this if the naming conventions avoided using protected words, but then they're a lot less catchy and easy to remember. Also I don't think Excel has a list, but it might be useful to make one.

[0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24928685/

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