ConnectedBases

I was looking through Nucleic Acids Research this morning, and I saw an abstract for taveRNA, which I remembered as a graphical design interface for bioinformatic workflows (PMC). But instead, it was a set of web-tools for understanding RNA structure (inteRNA, pRuNA, alteRNA). Both sets of tools share the name “taverna”.
So, my fellow scientists, if you are going be cute when naming your genes, proteins, databases, or program, please make sure your term is at least somewhat unique in Google or PubMed. Otherwise, keeping these things straight in my head is difficult.
This of course, is not meant to disparage the creators of the taveRNA suite. They have put together a useful set of tools for modeling inter- and intra-molecular interactions of RNA molecules. These sorts of tools are just going to be more and more important in the future, as we discover more riboswitches and other RNA-based regulators.

UPDATE—

The Wall Street Journal discusses how this is important for people’s names.