Another week, another JABBA award for Just Another Bogus Bioinformatics Acronym. The title of the paper — published on bioRxiv.org — that describes this tool, does not reveal the name:

Evaluation of de novo transcriptome assemblies from RNA-Seq data

Neither does the abstract, but when you get to the end of the Introduction, it is finally revealed:

We improve upon the state-of-the-art in transcriptome assembly evaluation by presenting DETONATE: DE novo TranscriptOme rNa-seq Assembly with or without the Truth Evaluation

Wow. Three of the eight letters in this name do not come from the initial letters of words, and five out of eleven words in the full name of the tool do not contribute to the acronym at all. I particularly like the 'with or without' part.

While I can understand why they didn't want to use the full acronym (DNTRAWOWTTE), I'm sure that they could have come up with something else instead — how about TETRA: Truth Evaluation Transcriptome RNAseq Assembler? But really, this is yet another example where you don't need to make an acronym! Just call the tool 'Detonate' and be done with it.