Due to Microsoft Excel, scientists had to rename 27 human genes. The program confused their names with dates

The Genes nomenclature committee recommended changing the names of several dozen human genes. According to The Verge, the reason for this was auto-formatting in Microsoft Excel, due to which errors occurred in scientific work.

The names of genes usually consist of several letters (most often it is an abbreviation indicating the purpose of the gene) and can be supplemented with numbers. Some of the previously existing names were similar to the names of the months of the year, which is why Excel, which scientists around the world use in their works, interpreted them as dates. For example, when recording an Excel cell, the March1 Gena Clot automatically converted it into “March 1”.

In total, over the past year, the Genov nomenclature committee issued recommendations for the renaming of 27 genes. So, for example, March1 became Marchf1, and Sept1 - Septin1.

The Verge notes that although in Excel when filling out the table you can turn off automatic formatting, this does not solve the problem: when the file will open another person whose default function is turned on, the data is still transformed.

Mistakes of this kind are extremely common. In 2016, a study was conducted, the participants of which studied 3597 scientific works published in the reviewed scientific journals - in about every fifth they found errors caused by automatic formatting of data in Excel.

Retold Grigory Levchenko