Gruber winner Botstein calls for better gene name system

Genomics expert Prof David Botstein says it's a fact that biologists would rather share a toothbrush than a gene's name -- the yeast gene that he knows as ABC1 is apparently known to fruit fly geneticists as 'bride of frizzled disco'.

Botstein, of the Lewis-Sigler Institute at Princeton University, says that while geneticists' quirky gene names may be amusing, the plethora of aliases for homologous genes across the plant, animal and microbial kingdoms confounds efforts to develop a logical and universal genetic language in which genes would be identified by function, rather than by abstract names.

Such a system would allow powerful computers to cross-reference species databases, build information about patterns of gene activity in complex networks, and even develop de novo hypotheses about as-yet undiscovered cellular systems.

"The central dogma was a dream that biology would ultimately be an information science," Botstein told the Tuesday evening plenary session of the XIX International Congress of Genetics. "We are now dealing with the reality, and the human brain is not very good at that sort of activity.

"We're going to have to live with the computer. What we do with computers has to become more sophisticated, because the combinatorial complexities are unreasonably large."

Botstein's Princeton group is one of the founders of the Gene Ontology Project, a collaboration between model organism genetic databases aimed at improving scientists' ability to interrogate them.

Botstein said it was now clear that his prediction several decades ago that what was true of yeast would also be broadly true of human beings, had been right on the money.

The challenge now was not only to understand how genes work individually, but how they interact -- and then to present the data in such a way that ordinary people, not just statisticians, could understand them.

Botstein is this year's winner of the prestigious Peter Gruber medal for genetics.