Badomics words and the power and peril of the ome-meme

In 1920, “Verbreitung und Ursache der Parthenogenesis im Pflanzen- und Tierreiche”–a landmark book by German botanist Hans Winkler–was published [1]. Translating the title into English yields “Spread and cause of pathogenesis in plant and animal kingdoms”. An interesting book, no doubt (and one that is available to read online thanks to the Biodiversity Heritage Library [2]), but it is not a fascination with pathogenesis that has kept the book in the limelight for almost 100？years. Instead, it is one passage on page 165 that is critical:"Ich schlage vor, für den haploiden Chromosomensatz, der im Verein mit dem zugeh？rigen Protoplasma die materielle Grundlage der systematischen Einheit darstellt den Ausdruck: das Genom zu verwenden und Kerne, Zellen und Organismen, in denen ein gleichartiges Genom mehr als einmal in jedem Kern vorhanden ist, homogenomatisch zu nennen, solche dagegen, die verschiedenartige Genome im Kern führen, heterogenomatisch."For those not up on their German, the beginning has been translated into English by Joshua Lederberg and Alexa McCray [3]:"I propose the expression Genom for the haploid chromosome set, which, together with the pertinent protoplasm, specifies the material foundations of the species."In other words, this was the birth of the term “genome”.If Winkler were alive today, he would be amazed and what his simple coinage has become. Genomes and “genomics” (the study of genomes)–the concepts and the words–are everywhere and have even spread widely into popular culture. A side effect of this spread has been the proliferation of genomic terminology. In this issue of GigaScience, McDonald et al.[4] track one aspect of this spread in the emergence of new “ome” words. They describe the collection of omics terms as the “ome-ome”. The main point of their analysis of the ome-ome is that, well, omics is everywhere. And they use this as evidence for the need to develop more standards for, in essence, communication among the different omes (or,