Michael,
With respect to Brother/ Big-brother, you certainly are being efficient. We
submitted the sequences because we were getting pestered by people working on
the mammalian 'homologs' for info and we thought the fairest way to deal with
the diverse competition was to put the data in the public domain. We hope to
submit the paper on these genes within the next few weeks. As you noted, the
names we used for data base submission are Brother and Big-brother. The Brother
designation stands for Beta for Runt and OTHERs. The beta comes from the name
of the mammalian protein, PEBP2/CBFbeta, you know where Runt comes from and the
Others part indicates our speculation that these widely expressed proteins will
do more than just interact with Runt (even if they don't the observation that
the proteins will interact with the mammalian Runt domain proteins already
justifies the name to a certain extent). We are currently using a capital
letter to refer to the gene because the name derives from a previously
identified protein. We don't have mutants yet (it is in interval 62A10 and not
uncovered by any extant deficiencies) but work in this direction is in progress.
We have noticed that there appears to be a Minute in this region and wonder what
the chances might be that our widely expressed genes correspond to this Minute.
If so, then what would happen to the gene names?
	Big-brother is related but definitely a distinct gene. The two genes
are closely linked, being separated by about 8 kb. The Big brother transcript
as well as the deduced protein sequence are slightly larger than for Brother.
Hence the name. As far as gene symbols goes (and I hope that this is not
stepping on any toes...) we would like to use Bro as the symbol for Brother.
If a 4 letter symbol is now obligatory then it should probably be Brot or Broh.
Neither is as appealing as the three letter designation, hence our preference.
For Big-brother we currently use Bgb in the lab. If this must be altered to 4
letters then Bgbr would be appropriate. As I mentioned above, we have not yet
submitted a manuscript so these symbols and names are not etched in concrete.
If you have comments, or suggestions then please send them back and we will
consider them seriously.
all best wishes,
Peter Gergen