Mistaken Identifiers: Gene name errors can be introduced inadvertently when using Excel in bioinformatics
BMC Bioinformatics,
Volume 5 June 2004
by Barry Zeeberg, Joseph Riss, David Kane, Kimberly Bussey, Edward Uchio, W Marston Linehan, J Carl Barrett and John WeinsteinAbstract: Background
When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names.
Results
A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in
the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions
affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot
be recovered.
Conclusions
Users of Excel for analyses involving gene names should be aware of this problem, which can cause genes, including medically
important ones, to be lost from view and which has contaminated even carefully curated public databases. We provide work-arounds
and scripts for circumventing the problem.
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