Saturday, July 30, 2011

When to use capitals

If you have been reading the signaling papers (and I know that they are not everybody's cup of tea) you ought to be aware of the molecular biologists convention for the names of genes and proteins.

Genes are generally cited in italics - so we have SYK or BCR-ABL - whereas the proteins produced from them are given in capitals: SYK or BCR-ABL or BCL2.

However, if we are talking about mouse proteins rather than human proteins the names are given in lower case letters: bcl2 and lyn and bid.

I am not a molecular biologist, so I do make mistakes here.

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