Highlights of the 'Gene Nomenclature Across Species' Meeting

The meeting began with a welcome and outline of the agenda from Elspeth Bruford, one of the meeting organisers and the group coordinator for the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee (HGNC). HGNC has been based at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, since 2007. Since its inception in 1979, the HGNC has been assigning gene symbols and names to all human genes, including pseudogenes and non-coding RNAs.The first session was chaired by Jennifer Harrow, who leads the Human and Vertebrate Analysis and Annotation (Havana) group from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (WTSI), also located on the Hinxton campus. This session was devoted to introducing the three established gene nomenclature groups for mammals -- namely HGNC, the Mouse Genome Nomenclature Committee (MGNC) -- based at the Mouse Genome Informatics Database (MGI) at the Jackson Laboratory in Maine, USA -- and the Rat Genome and Nomenclature Committee, based at the Rat Genome Database (RGD) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA. Matt Wright from the HGNC, coorganiser of the meeting, kicked off by discussing the current work of the HGNC, 'An Essential Resource for the Human Genome'. Matt outlined the roles of the HGNC, including a summary of the process of symbol assignment, and its current efforts in coordinating gene naming across vertebrates. He also highlighted instances where the lack of approved gene nomenclature for most mammalian genomes has resulted in valuable published data for these species being absent or confused in the genomic databases. He was followed by Janan Eppig, principal investigator of the MGI, who, in her talk, 'What's in a Name', told us about current nomenclature issues and activities for the mouse. As well as genes, the group at MGI also name genetic markers, alleles, mutations and strains. Current efforts are focused on creating a unified gene catalogue for the mouse, by comparing gene models from the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI)'s Entrez Gene databa