The international scientific community has renamed 27 of human genes due to problems with the operation of the software. This publication reports The Verge.
The Committee on nomenclature of the genes (HGNC) provided updated recommendations for the reduced name of genes, the specialists had to change the names of the 27 genetic factors. It had to be done due to issues with Microsoft Excel, which interpreted the old names as dates.
Genes traditionally have alphanumeric designations which are not always displayed correctly when entering in the spreadsheet. In particular, MARCH1 — abbreviated from the name of the gene Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1 — is understood as a short notation of the date and translates to “March 1” case. In Excel there is no possibility to disable the automatic conversion of characters, the only way to avoid error, according to experts, is to change the data types for individual columns of a table.
“It’s very annoying,” he told reporters geneticist Desault, and Modos (Dezső Módos). Excel is a common program among the scientific community, so errors due to incorrect interpretation of the character identifications happen quite often. For example, in a large study from 2016 has been studied more than 3,5 thousand scientific papers on genetics and in the fifth part of them have been associated with incorrect interpretation of the error.
To solve the problem, HGNC decided to rename the problematic genes and to prescribe their new designation as recommended. In particular, abbreviation of MARCH1 was MARCHF1, SEPT1 — SEPTIN1. The updated record will be stored in a special table, to avoid confusion in the future.
According to the coordinator of HGNC Elspeth Bruford (Bruford Elspeth), Microsoft is unlikely to change a whole program just for one segment of researchers. “That’s a pretty specific use case of Excel,” said the specialist. The Verge sent a request to Microsoft but have not received a prompt response.
