Naming Genes and Mutants
I’ve always had a strong dislike about certain biology naming conventions, but one thing that I always found rather strange was some of the whimsical and utterly meaningless names given to some genes and mutants. Take hedgehog, for example, or Bicoid. Meaningless names, really; they vaguely correspond to some sort of phenotype, but other than that, have very little to do with the actual biological function.
A paper I’m reading for a class, however, gleefully points out that meaningless names have their purpose: they don’t go obsolete with new information:
Epstein was struck by the similarity of the amber mutants and the so-called hd, or host-defective mutants….Who first had the idea that amber mutations are a general class of “suppressor-sensitive” mutations, I don’t recall….That year, Campbell did further experiments to show that the hd mutants (then renamed sus, for suppressor-sensitive) were in fact responding to a bacterial suppressor gene…
(It is amusing to note that Campbell found it necessary to rename his mutants after learning more about them, whereas the name amber is just as meaningless, and thus just as useful, now, as when the mutants were first discovered and named for Mrs. Bernstein.)
Edgar, R.S. 1966. In: Phage and the Origins of Molecular Biology, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY. p. 166-170.
hd and amber mutants are the same type of mutant, and “amber” is the English version of the German name “Bernstein.”
So, perhaps those Drosophila geneticists are doing a service to the rest of us after all.
