2013 ended with a bumper crop of new JABBA awards for bogus bioinformatics acronyms
I have a huge backlog of JABBA awards to hand out. These are all collated from the annual publication of the (voluminous) 2013 Nucleic Acids Research Database Issue. So without further ado, here are the recipients of the latest batch of JABBA awards:
- IDEAL in 2014 illustrates interaction networks composed of intrinsically disordered proteins and their binding partners — If you want to know what IDEAL means, I can tell you that it is an acronym for Intrinsically Disordered proteins with Extensive Annotations and Literature. The 'E' for Extensive is clearly added to make the word IDEAL. They could have also used 'Elaborate', 'Electronic', or maybe 'Eclectic'. To their credit, a Google search for IDEAL database does put them as the top hit. Now that's ideal.
- Updates on the web-based VIOLIN vaccine database and analysis system — The full name of this resource is The integrative Vaccine Investigation and Online Information Network, so they missed an opportunity to name it 'iVIOLIN'.
- HRaP: database of occurrence of HomoRepeats and patterns in proteomes — Good job they were not building a database of 'canonical' repeat patterns.
- RADAR: a rigorously annotated database of A-to-I RNA editing — Strikes me as more 'ridiculous' than 'rigorous'.
- NPInter v2.0: an updated database of ncRNA interactions — You have to read the abstract for version 1 of this tool to discover where the 'P' comes from, the database is fully named The noncoding RNAs and protein related biomacromolecules interaction database.
- The YEASTRACT database: an upgraded information system for the analysis of gene and genomic transcription regulation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae — The acronym here is derived from YEAst Search for Transcriptional Regulators And Consensus Tracking (as if that wasn't obvious).
- 3did: a catalog of domain-based interactions of known three-dimensional structure — In which '3did' refers to 3D Interacting Domains. It is a fairly widespread convention that 3D uses an uppercase 'D' when referring to dimensionality, and yet here they go for all lower case letters, making it read as 'three did'.
- NECTAR: a database of codon-centric missense variant annotations — Another case of highly selective choices of letters to form the acronym. The full name for this database is the Non-synonymous Enriched Coding muTation ARchive.
- LoQAtE—Localization and Quantitation ATlas of the yeast proteomE. A new tool for multiparametric dissection of single-protein behavior in response to biological perturbations in yeast — Presumably pronounced 'locate', but if someone hears about the tool without seeing the spelling, then I doubt they will have much luck finding it online. Given the highly selective use of letters to form the name, they could have just called it 'LOCATE'.
- HoPaCI-DB: host-Pseudomonas and Coxiella interaction database — The 'Pa' comes from Pseudomonas aeruginosa, but the other species (Coxiella burnetii) only contributes a 'C'. More importantly, how do you pronounce this database name? Hoe-packy? Hoe-pacey? Hoppa-cee? Hoppa-sigh?
Honorable mention:
- canSAR: updated cancer research and drug discovery knowledgebase — This looks like it should be an acronym for something, but I can't find any details. It would make more sense to me if it was an acronym, otherwise it just looks like someone can't spell 'cancer'.