Flies Like Us: How kojak and icebox Got Their Names

By Seth Stanton | 3.12.07

A half dozen years or so ago I was considering a career in molecular biology when I realized that almost every gene I’d ever read about had a dull and boring name. I was genuinely upset by this, as it appeared to me that any scientist who has the opportunity to name a gene and then names it, say, p53, has a serious lack of personality, and was neither the sort of colleague I wanted to work with, nor the sort of person I wanted eventually to become. I believe I must have made a lament on this topic to some more experienced scientists, because it was around this time that I was introduced to a paper that entirely changed my outlook. It was a groundbreaking article that opened up whole new avenues of research on the genetic basis of addiction - but it wasn’t the substance of the paper that excited me: I was excited by the name of a gene.

Cheapdate! A fly that has lowered alcohol tolerance and they named it cheapdate! Oh, how fantastic! There are people like me in science, people who are politically incorrect smartasses, people whose thirst for knowledge is tempered by an appreciation for a good joke!

I almost hate to admit it, but this paper really did have that sort of sway over me. I had dreams of discovering a gene and giving it a ridiculous name – after weeks of barroom deliberations with my smartass coworkers over numerous sidesplitting choices.

Later, following an actual foray into molecular biological research, a few sobering facts became obvious.

• I probably wouldn’t discover a novel gene.
• The chances that I, the peon grad student, would be allowed to name a novel gene were even slimmer.
• I was definitely the biggest smartass in my lab, and the smartass names I could come up with were not likely to fly with my (mostly) non-smartass labmates and PI (principal investigator, a.k.a the person that runs the lab and pays the salaries).
• We worked on breast cancer, which doesn’t appear to lend itself particularly well to smartass names.

I also came to realize that the over-serious culture of research science as a whole doesn’t lend itself to funny or weird gene names. Not only does it take a little luck to find a gene you can name and publish, but it also takes a ballsy researcher to break scientific decorum and risk the disapproval of their colleagues by naming the gene something out of the ordinary. Creative gene names are like dirty jokes at a fancy dinner party: as funny as they might be in other circumstances, they’re the sort of breach of etiquette that leaves everyone intently studying their lobster bisque. Furthermore, as this article points out, when whimsically-named genes turn out to have serious medical implications, their funny index can plunge even further. For these reasons, most researchers stick with good-ol’-fashioned boring scientific names.

The exceptions to this rule are the fruit fly researchers, who have proven again and again that they are the rockstars of scientific nomenclature. Fruit flies are an old favorite of biologists around the globe for a multitude of reasons: they’re cheap to care for, they go through a generation in about 2 weeks, and animal rights activists don’t raise much of a stink even if you send hundreds upon hundreds of them to the fly morgue on a daily basis. Furthermore, their genome has been completely sequenced since 2000 and there’s tons of molecular biology “toys” that have been developed as a result of decades and decades of research. Despite their obvious physical dissimilarity to humans, fruit flies have been instrumental in unlocking numerous puzzles of how life works, and the results from a number of fly studies can be applied to our understanding of human beings. For example, the visual system of the fly, while rudimentary, possesses a number of similarities to the human retina, and discoveries about the molecular workings of the fly eye and its development have helped advance our understanding of our own visual system.

For some reason, fruit fly researchers aren’t bound by the same scientific politesse as scientists in other fields of genetics when naming new genes, and it’s a tiny act of rebellion against the stodgy formality of science that many of them seem to be proud of. While there are varying opinions on the matter, this difference between fly research and the majority of the scientific community may be attributable to the fact that fly research predates the concept of individual genes, instead harkening back to an age where mutant flies were named for their visible characteristics by scientists who had no real idea of what the mutations were that actually produced these different phenotypes. As Dr. Diego Castrillon of the UT-Southwestern Medical Center puts it, fruit flies genes “break the mold when it comes to names”. He described the three rules for a Drosophila gene name: it must be descriptive and memorable, it must reflect the phenotype, and it must demonstrate “how erudite” the researchers are. Here are some of my favorite examples:

Kenny: The fly that dies

In naming a new Drosophila mutant that had high susceptibility to bacterial infections and a resulting high mortality rate, Dr. Sophie Rutschmann, then of the Institut de Biologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire in Strasbourg, France, looked no further than her favorite character from her favorite television show, “South Park”; thus was the Drosophila mutant kenny born. Rutschmann was worried that her supervisors wouldn’t be receptive to the name, and she “spent the whole night trying to find the best arguments to make my PhD advisor and the lab director accept it,” but as it turned out, they immediately agreed, and even made pictures of Kenny a staple in their presentations at scientific conferences.

Icebox: The asexual fly

Dr. John Ringo, then at the University of Maine, discovered a Drosophila mutant with a behavioral defect that renders females uninterested in courtship behavior. His first choice, frigid, was nixed by colleagues as sexist, and the Hebrew names his wife came up with were, in his words, “a little exotic for a Drosophila name (although in retrospect, not)” But his follow-up choice of icebox was somehow well-received. Apparently, this not only got across the imagery he wanted, but also gave him a good memory of his growing up with an icebox instead of a refrigerator. There is, however, a bit of a double entendre here, as he hinted later in his correspondence by admitting that the name was partly a result of conversations with his “good friend and colleague [and fellow University of Maine researcher] Dusty Dowse,” who he described fondly as “combination scientist, mathematician, brewer and baker, boat builder, biker, musician, writer, iconoclast, and dirty old man.”

Kojak: The bald fly

Dr. Paul Adler, whose laboratory is located at the University of Virginia, works with a number of Drosophila mutants that show a phenotype of abnormal cuticular (wing) hair growth, and he reports having named all of them them via discussions “around coffee in the lab.” His lab is a prolific group of fly namers, having named not only the hairless kojak, bur also the van gogh and starry night flies, so named because “the wing hairs that normally are all aligned and point distally now displayed swirling patterns” (much like the brush strokes in the painting). He also mentioned to me a number of names of unpublished hair-related Drosophila mutants, including the even more amusing name don king. Although, to be fair, with that name the fly should also have behavioral and language deficits.

INDY: The fly that wouldn’t die

The laboratory of Dr. Steven Helfand at The University of Connecticut Health Center had a mutant on their hands which had an extended lifespan. One of the authors, Dr. Rob Reenan, found a name for the fly in an old comedy standby, Monty Python. The fly, named INDY (I’m Not Dead Yet), was published in a Science paper in 2000. I suppose this should probably go without saying, but the comedy troupe Monty Python are heroes to many scientists. The real surprise, in my eyes, is the fact that I only found one fly that referenced them. If only we could find a fly that grows a very long beaklike proboscis, it would obviously receive the name llama.

Ken & Barbie: Safe for children under 12

Dr. Diego Castrillon and his colleagues had a virtual goldmine of genes to name after their forward genetic screen for male-sterile mutants. They took a semi-systematic approach of sitting down over coffee and naming most of their genes in regards to “themes”, such as the sports-themed mutants (bocce, cue ball, fumble and doublefault). However, the finest name to come out of the screen – and the “perfect” Drosophila mutant name according to Dr. Castrillon – is the one used to describe a mutant where both males and females fail to develop external genitalia, and have unpigmented (blond) aristae (tips of their antennae). The flies’ names: ken and barbie.

To give credit where credit’s due, it’s worth pointing out that researchers outside the Drosophila community do occasionally come up with tongue-in-cheek names for their newfound genes. A recent example of this was an oncogene (or cancer causing gene) discovered in a Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center laboratory that was named POK (from the POZ and Kruppel family of genes) Erythroid Myeloid ONtogenic factor, or POKEMON. This rare foray into creative naming was immediately rewarded with the threat of a lawsuit from Pokemon USA, the Nintendo subsidiary, followed by a subsequent name change to the significantly less exciting Zbtb7. While not exactly a success story, this incident does show that, even in a cancer lab, some people do appreciate a good, creative gene name.

And what about my own quest for naming rights to a gene? Well, as luck would have it, I finally received that very opportunity a few years ago: a fresh new gene, totally unpublished and waiting for me to give it a fantastically creative name that would go down in history. I sat in my apartment and deliberated by myself for most of an evening, and then went to my PI the following day with my suggestion: E6-Interacting P53 Regulator, or EIPR.

Damn.

References

Castrillon DH, Gonczy P, Alexander S, Rawson R, Eberhart CG, Viswanathan S, DiNardo S, Wasserman SA. 1993. Toward a molecular genetic analysis of spermatogenesis in Drosophila melanogaster: characterization of male-sterile mutants generated by single P element mutagenesis. Genetics 135(2): 489-505.

Kerr C, Ringo J, Dowse H, Johnson E. 1997. Icebox, a recessive X-linked mutation in Drosophila causing low sexual receptivity. J Neurogenet. 11(3-4): 213-29.

Maeda T, Hobbs RM, Merghoub T, Guernah I, Zelent A, Cordon-Cardo C, Teruya-Feldstein J, Pandolfi PP. 2005. Role of the proto-oncogene Pokemon in cellular transformation and ARF repression. Nature 433(7023): 278-85.

Moore MS, DeZazzo J, Luk AY, Tully T, Singh CM, Heberlein U. 1998. Ethanol intoxication in Drosophila: Genetic and pharmacological evidence for regulation by the cAMP signaling pathway. Cell 93(6): 997-1007.

Ren N, He B, Stone D, Kirakodu S, Adler PN. 2006. The shavenoid gene of Drosophila encodes a novel actin cytoskeleton interacting protein that promotes wing hair morphogenesis.
Genetics 172(3): 1643-53.

Rogina B, Reenan RA, Nilsen SP, Helfand SL. 2000. Extended life-span conferred by cotransporter gene mutations in Drosophila. Science 290(5499): 2137-40.

Rutschmann S, Jung AC, Zhou R, Silverman N, Hoffmann JA, Ferrandon D. 2000. Role of Drosophila IKK gamma in a toll-independent antibacterial immune response.
Nat Immunol. 1(4): 342-7.