Another winner of the JABBA award for horrible bioinformatics acronyms

It's time to hand out another JABBA (Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym) award. Joining the recent recipients is a tool described in the latest issue of the Bioinformatics journal.

I don't have any problem with the acronym itself, and this is not a tool which is randomly adding or removing letters from the full name to produce the acronym. So what is my problem? Well the tool — which calculates a score to assess the local quality of a protein structure — is called The Local Distance Difference Test. And the acronym? Oh, the acronym is just 'lDDT' with a lower-case 'L'.

Now, this might not be so bad if it were not for the fact that all fonts used by the Bioinformatics journal (HTML & PDF versions) as well as the author's own website make this 'L' look like the letter I or the number 1.

From the HTML

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From the PDF

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From the author's website

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I can't help but imagine that people will only ever read this as IDDT and not LDDT...which of course doesn't bode well if someone ends up Googling for this tool at a later date. Compare a search for LDDT (which finds the correct tool) vs a search for IDDT (which doesn't:

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Congratulations on being the recipient of another JABBA award!