Time for some new JABBA awards to recognize the ongoing series of crimes perpetrated in the name of bioinformatics. Two new examples this week…

Exhibit A (h/t @attilacsordas): from arxiv.org we have…

CoMEt: A Statistical Approach to Identify Combinations of Mutually Exclusive Alterations in Cancer

CoMEt derives from 'Combinations of Mutually Exclusive Alterations'. Of course the best way of making it easy for people to find your bioinformatics tool is to give it an identical name as an existing tool which does something completely different. So don't be surprised if you search for the web for 'CoMEt' only to find a bioinformatics tool called 'CoMet' from 2011 (note the lower-case 'e'!). CoMet is a web server for comparative functional profiling of metagenomes.

Exhibit B: from the journal Bioinformatics — the leading provider of bogus bioinformatics acronyms since 1998 — we have…

MUSCLE: automated multi-objective evolutionary optimization of targeted LC-MS/MS analysis

MUSCLE is derived from 'Multi-platform Unbiased optimization of Spectrometry via Closed-Loop Experimentation'. Multi-platform you say? What platforms would those be? From the paper:

MUSCLE is a stand-alone desktop application and has been tested on Windows XP, 7 and 8

What, no love for Windows Vista?

Of course, it should be obvious to anyone that this bioinformatics tool called MUSCLE should in no way be confused with the other (pre-existing) bioinformatics tool called MUSCLE.