A paper in BMC Bioinformatics describes a new piece of software:

morFeus: a web-based program to detect remotely conserved orthologs using symmetrical best hits and orthology network scoring

Naturally, my first instincts were to check whether this was a name worthy of a JABBA award, but morFeus does not appear to be an acronym or initialism. I say that because although the name morFeus appears 116 times in the manuscript, no explanation is ever given as to why the software has that name.

My first thought was that maybe it is a reference to Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams, or maybe to the character of Morpheus from The Matrix. I don't really care about why it is called morFeus — a name that my spell checker keeps correcting to morgues — but it is another example of the, seemingly random, capitalization of bioinformatics tools.

When I visited the web server for the morFeus tool, I did notice something in small print at the bottom of the page:

morFeus stands for meta-analysis based orthology finder using symmetrical best hits

This is something that also appears as a keyword in the manuscript, but it is not entirely obvious as to whether this really is meant to be an initialism, or why the F is capitalized. I'm completely stuMped.