Today I like to talk about how you distinguish between a gene or a protein, and between a wild type version and a mutant or allelic version.

As a genes and proteins have identical names it can be difficult to distinguish between them. The same counts for if you want to distinguish between a wild type version of a gene or protein and its mutant or allelic version you work with.

Now you can go on and say, “gene Y did this” and “protein Y does that”.  But in an article in which you talk a lot about how specific genes and proteins work and interact this can quickly become long winded. You would not be the only one to think so.

Scientist therefore have come up with workable solutions. This typical result in the work of jargon. While your regular of the mill jargon replaces a description with a single word or abbreviation, in this case researchers went for a bit more elegant solution. Although you still need to be initiated into it to understand it.

The solution they came up was, just to change the way they write the name of the gene/protein. Protein names keep the standard standing up straight typeface, like how the rest of the text is written. When the researcher is talking on the other hand about genes the name is written in italics. Like gene names gene names and their abbreviations are either capitalized or all caps.

Vertebrates and plants

It depends on the organism how the gene/protein names are written and abbreviated. In vertebrates and plants, the names and abbreviations are in general capitalized and depending on the organism the originate from it can also be all caps, such as plant genes for example.

Then when speaking about mutant or allelic versions of a particular gene/protein they are only written in lowercase letters. And in the case of multiple versions, a number might be added to the end to distinguish between those.

Bacteria

For bacterial genes the name is a mnemonic of three letters in lowercase, giving an indication of the function of the gene product, followed by a capital letter specifying the gene. When talking about the protein though, the name is capitalized.

The distinction between bacterial wild type and mutant genes is denoted by a superscript ⁺ for wild type or ^– for mutant, the ^– can also be left off.

Example

So just as a recap and an example. Taking the plant gene/protein WUSCHEL (WUS). When I talk about the protein it is: WUS. The gene is WUS. When I talk about a mutated protein version it is wus-1, and its mutated gene version is wus-1. As you see I added a number to the mutated version as there are multiple lines with a mutated wus gene, each in a different location.

But when talking about a bacterial gene for α-subunit of RNA polymerase, it is rpoA when talking about its gene, and RpoA when talking about its protein. For its wildtype gene version rpoA⁺ is used, and RpoA⁺ for its protein wild type. The mutant gene version can be both rpoA and rpoA^–. And its protein mutant version can both be RpoA and RpoA^–.

Although this is the general standard, there are always exception of how gene/protein are named and abbreviated. If you are usure look it up

Exercise

No prompt today, but a little exercise for those of you working on genes and proteins. Familiarise or re-familiarise yourself with how the gene and protein names are written for the organisms you are working with.

Are there any practices that you did not know off?

Let me know in the comments. As well as any questions you may have.

Happy writing