Good paper but bad omics word of the day: drugome

Already tweeted about this but felt it had to be given more prominent status. There is a new, interesting paper in PLoS Computation Biology: The Mycobacterium tuberculosis Drugome and Its Polypharmacological Implications
But that word – drugome. Here is their definition

The resulting drug-target interaction network for all structurally characterized approved drugs bound to putative M.tb receptors, we refer to as the ‘TB-drugome’

I really do not think they need to make that into a “ome” word. Mind you, the study is cool and useful. But that word. It is not very good. And thus they are winners of my “Bad omics word of the day” award.

Figure 2. A protein-drug interaction network to illustrate similarities between the binding sites of M.tb proteins (blue), and binding sites containing approved drugs (red). From Kinnings SL, Xie L, Fung KH, Jackson RM, Xie L, et al. (2010) The Mycobacterium tuberculosis Drugome and Its Polypharmacological Implications. PLoS Comput Biol 6(11): e1000976. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000976 

Hat tip to @7T1 and @dgaston83 and @toranaga for pointing this one out.

Author: Jonathan Eisen

I am an evolutionary biologist and a Professor at U. C. Davis. (see my lab site here). My research focuses on the origin of novelty (how new processes and functions originate). To study this I focus on sequencing and analyzing genomes of organisms, especially microbes and using phylogenomic analysis

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