07 August 2020

The Verge: “Scientists rename human genes to stop Microsoft Excel from misreading them as dates”

The problem isn’t as unexpected as it first sounds. Excel is a behemoth in the spreadsheet world and is regularly used by scientists to track their work and even conduct clinical trials. But its default settings were designed with more mundane applications in mind, so when a user inputs a gene’s alphanumeric symbol into a spreadsheet, like MARCH1 — short for “Membrane Associated Ring-CH-Type Finger 1” — Excel converts that into a date: 1-Mar.


Help has arrived, though, in the form of the scientific body in charge of standardizing the names of genes, the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee, or HGNC. This week, the HGNC published new guidelines for gene naming, including for “symbols that affect data handling and retrieval”. From now on, they say, human genes and the proteins they expressed will be named with one eye on Excel’s auto-formatting. That means the symbol MARCH1 has now become MARCHF1, while SEPT1 has become SEPTIN1, and so on. A record of old symbols and names will be stored by HGNC to avoid confusion in the future.

James Vincent

From the news department ‘Scientists are people, just like the rest of us’: a common problem with an extremely simple solution. Literally the first result when you google ‘excel turn off automatic date’ is a link to Microsoft’s support site explaining how to avoid this default behavior in several ways. And no, once you change cells to ‘text’ type, Excel does not change that setting when someone else opens the file, as the article wrongly states.

I have never quite understood this tendency to come up with cute acronyms for complex phrases. It may make the phrases easier to remember for some people, but introduces other issues when you step out of that particular field – the same acronym may mean a different thing in astrophysics than in genetics for example – or outside the English language space – for a Chinese scientist MARCH1 has no intrinsic meaning, and he may prefer a different one that sounds similar to a Chinese word.

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