Tag: bad omics words of the day

Worst new omics word award: circomics – running circles around my head

Wow – this is really not a good “omics” word.  Check out this paper title and it’s abstract Circular DNA genomics (circomics) exemplified for g… [Virology. 2012] – PubMed – NCBI

Circomics was coined to describe the combination of rolling circle amplification (RCA), restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) and pyro-sequencing to investigate the genome structures of small circular DNAs. A batch procedure is described using 61 plant samples from Asia, South America and Central America which revealed 83 contig sequences of geminiviral DNA components and 4 contig sequences of DNA satellites. The usefulness of this approach is validated for the Brazilian begomoviruses, and the sequence fidelity is determined by comparing the results with those of conventional cloning and sequencing of Bolivian begomoviruses reported recently. Therefore, circomics has been proven to be a major step forward to economize costs and labor and to characterize reliably geminiviral genomes in their population structure of the quasi species.

This definitely fits the category of a “bad omics” word which I have history of complaining about but had been ignoring for a bit.  But I am back.  I am giving “Circomics” a “Worst New Omics Word Award” here because, well, it seems completely unnecessary and distracting.

Hat tip to AJ Cann for pointing this one out on Google Plus.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Bad omics word of the day: religionome

And so they go – on and on.  I am addicted to bad omics words.  They are a bit fascinating ion that the spread of the ome suffix is astonishing.  And here is one that is both funny and a bit sad: religionome.  Not that new.  But out there.  And winner of today’s “Bad omics word of the day.” Not sure exactly where it started but here is one of the first uses I could find:

We have a lot of new data we are working on, and one of the thoughts I’ve come up with recently is can we create something similar to the human genome – perhaps we can call it the religionome – with which we can begin to look at all of the different beliefs and practices and traditions and try to evaluate and understand them not just from a spiritual perspective or a subjective perspective, but from physiological and biological and social and cultural perspectives as well

This is from a transcript of a conference involving Andrew Newberg from U. Penn.

Some other things on this include:

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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