Biology Faculty Articles
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
8-22-2019
Publication Title
GigaScience
ISSN
2047-217X
Volume
8
Issue/No.
8
First Page
giz086
Abstract
The confluence of two scientific disciplines may lead to nomenclature conflicts that require new terms while respecting historical definitions. This is the situation with the current state of cytology and genomics, which offer examples of distinct nomenclature and vocabularies that require reconciliation. In this article, we propose the new terms C-scaffold (for chromosome-scale assemblies of sequenced DNA fragments, commonly named scaffolds) and scaffotype (the resulting collection of C-scaffolds that represent an organism's genome). This nomenclature avoids conflict with the historical definitions of the terms chromosome (a microscopic body made of DNA and protein) and karyotype (the collection of images of all chromosomes of an organism or species). As large-scale sequencing projects progress, adoption of this nomenclature will assist end users to properly classify genome assemblies, thus facilitating genomic analysis.
NSUWorks Citation
Lewin, Harris A.; Jennifer A. Marshall Graves; Oliver A. Ryder; Alexander S. Graphodatsky; and Stephen James O'Brien. 2019. "Precision nomenclature for the new genomics." GigaScience 8, (8): giz086. doi:10.1093/gigascience/giz086.
DOI
10.1093/gigascience/giz086
Comments
© The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.