And the award for needless use of subscript in the name of a bioinformatics tool goes to…

The following paper can be found in the latest issue of Bioinformatics:

• Computational identification of MoRFs in protein sequences

MoRFs are molecular recognition features, and the tool that the authors developed to identify them is called:

MoRF_CHiBi

So the tool's name includes a subscripted version of 'CHiBi', a name which is taken from the shorthand name for the Center for High-Throughput Biology at the University of British Columbia (this is where the software was presumably developed). The website for MoRF_CHiBi goes one step further by describing something called the MoRF_ChiBi,mc predictor. I'm glad that they felt that some italicized text was just the thing to complement the subscripted, mixed case name.

The subscript seems to serve no useful purpose and just makes the software name harder to read, particularly because it combines a lot of mixed capitalization. It also doesn't help that 'ChiBi' can be read as 'kai-bye' or 'chee-bee'. I'm curious whether the CHiBi be adding their name as a subscripted suffix to all of their software, or just this one?