Dear Steven,
Thanks for your email.
I’m all for using the human ortholog name. This makes the fly literature more accessible and searchable by people working with mammalian systems. So I suggest going with TP53INP.
best regards,
Aurelio
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Dear Aurelio
I am writing to you about the nomenclature for the ‘DOR’ ('Diabetes and obesity regulated’) gene in FlyBase, which was named as such based on your 2010 papers:
Francis, V.A., Zorzano, A., Teleman, A.A. (2010). dDOR Is an EcR Coactivator that Forms a Feed-Forward Loop Connecting Insulin and Ecdysone Signaling.  Curr. Biol. 20(20): 1799--1808.
Mauvezin, C., Orpinell, M., Francis, V.A., Mansilla, F., Duran, J., Ribas, V., Palacín, M., Boya, P., Teleman, A.A., Zorzano, A. (2010). The nuclear cofactor DOR regulates autophagy in mammalian and Drosophila cells.  EMBO Rep. 11(1): 37--44.
(Note that FlyBase never uses a ‘d’ prefix to indicate ‘drosophila’ in its gene symbols, so your ‘dDOR’ became just ‘DOR’.)
Naming the CG11347 gene as ‘DOR’ in FlyBase was an error on our behalf, as there was already a well-studied gene named ‘dor’ (deep orange) and we do not allow a gene to have a symbol that differs from another only by case (as it just causes confusion and mistakes).
So, we need to assign a new, unique symbol to the ‘DOR’ gene in FlyBase.
A simple solution would be to introduce an ‘a’ into the symbol to represent the ‘and’ in the full name; i.e. use ‘DAOR’.
Alternatively, we could use the current symbol of the mammalian orthologs, namely ’TP53INP’ (for ’tumor protein p53 inducible nuclear protein’).
Either way, ‘DOR’ and ‘dDOR’ would remain as synonyms for the gene so FlyBase users searching with those terms would still find the gene and see those synonyms.
What are your thoughts?
Best wishes,
Steven.
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Steven Marygold
FlyBase