New JABBA awards for crimes against bioinformatics acronyms
JABBA is an acronym for Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym. I hand out JABBA awards to bioinformatics papers that reach just a little bit too far when trying to come up with acronyms (or intialisms). See details of previous winners here.
So without further delay, let's see who the new recipients are. As always, journals like Bioinformatics produce many strong candidates for JABBA awards. Here are three winners from the latest issue:
- mpMoRFsDB: a database of molecular recognition features in membrane proteins - What is it with the need for so much use of mixed-case characters these days? It makes names harder to read, and this database has a name which doesn't really roll off the tongue.
- CoDNaS: a database of conformational diversity in the native state of proteins - More mixed case madness. I'm really unsure how this database should be pronounced. 'Cod Naz'? 'Code Nass'? 'Coe Dee-en-ays'? The abstract suggests that the acronym stems from the name 'Conformational Diversity of Native State', so I guess we should be thankful that they avoided the potential confusion of naming this database 'CoDoNS'.
- GALANT: a Cytoscape plugin for visualizing data as functional landscapes projected onto biological networks - If you want your bioinformatics tool to have a cool sounding name, just give it that name. Don't feel that you somehow have to tenuously arrive at that name from a dubious method of selecting just the letters that make it work. The abstract of this paper reveals that GALANT stems from 'GrAph LANdscape VisualizaTion'. So the full name only consists of three words, and the initial letter of one of those words doesn't even make it into the acronym/initialism. They may as well call their tool 'GREAT' (GRaph landscapE visualizATion).