Thursday, October 01, 2009

Worst new omics word award: Omnigenomics by (surprisingly) @Genomicron

Well, been taking a break from this award, as I am in over my head with teaching right now. But could not resist this one. Based on a tip from Marcio Pie in Brazil I checked out T. Ryan Gregory's recent posting (Genomicron: Omnigenomics) on his normally excellent Genomicron Blog. And he has clearly been overcome with H1N1 fever or something like that, as he discusses in this new posting, his desire to coin a catchy new omics word to describe his work on comparisons of genome size across species.

And he has chosen, get ready

OMNIGENOMICS
Proposed neologism: "Omnigenomics"

Etymology: Latin "omnis" (all or everything) + genomics (study of genomes)

Sample usage: "What do you do?" / "Omnigenomics" / "What's that?" / "I study the total amount of DNA in different species of animals, which includes genes and all the other sequences, most of which are non-coding and..."
All I can say, as I did in the comments on his blog, is

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

And for this full slide down the slippery slope of omics words, T. Ryan Gregory is the recipient of my fourth "Worst New Omics Word Award." Check out previous winners:diseasome, ethomics, and Museomics. (I note if you look through Google results, domain names with omnigenomics in them have been registered previously and then allowed to expire. Those were good deaths. Hope the resurrection is short lived).


7 comments:

  1. Oh my, I didn't have any speech ready.. Oh, uh, I want to thank Jonathan, of course, and, um, all the fans of omnigenomics research...

    BTW -- great idea: omnigenomics.org now registered!

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  2. (Oh, and pretty rich posting that on phylogenomics.blogspot.com)

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  3. Almost registered that and then was going to sell it to you ...

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  4. Isn't it kinda like the Department of Redundancy Department? How is it different from genomics?

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  5. My first reaction to the Genomicron posting was "hey, that's the study of my cat's genome" (her name is Omni) ... I got sick of -omics terms several years ago, when the journal Microbial & Comparative Genomics (nee Genome Science and Technology) rose from the grave as OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology. The whole thing reminds me of the rage for coining new "-somes" back in the 1970s and 1980s, with replisomes, primosomes, secretosomes, spliceosome, etc., leading me to coin alledgeosome ;-)

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  6. Guy -- send us blood from your cat, and we'll measure it!

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  7. No go on the Omni blood -- but I think she'd be happy to extract some of mine! Sorry for diverting this thread ...

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