Sequencing acronyms updated

A year ago I wrote a post about the explosion of different NGS acronyms. When I wrote it I was surprised to see over 30 different acronyms and suggested that part of this was authors wanting to make their work stand out, hopefully coining the next “ChIP-seq”.

In the past year more and more NGS acronyms have been published. I am partly responsible for one of these TAm-seq and understand better the reasoning for using acronyms. Once I have spoken to someone about the work we did in the STM paper I can simply refer to TAm-seq in future conversations.

It might help if we as a community could agree on a naming convention to make searching for work using specific techniques easier. There are multiple techniques for analysis of RNAs and using the catch-all “RNA-seq” would allow much quicker PubMed searching. Of course we would need to add keywords around the particular technique being used, RNA-seq could encompass mRNA, ribosome removal, strand-specific, small, micro, pi, linc, etc, etc, etc.

Here is a list of acronyms that we in the community could use to simplify things today. It would obviously need tidying up every year or so as new acronyms get added.

• DNA-seq: Unmodified genome sequencing.
• RNA-seq: All things RNA.
• SV-seq: Structural-variation sequencing.
• Capture-seq: Exomes and other target capture sequencing.
• Amplicon-seq: Amplicon sequencing.
• Methyl-seq: Methylation and other base modification sequencing.
• IP-seq: Immuno-Precipitation sequencing. 

Let me know what you think

Again, here is a link to the data.