When we were beta-testing [two new bioinformatics programs] on microarray data, a frustrating problem occurred repeatedly: Some gene names kept bouncing back as “unknown.” A little detective work revealed the reason: … A default date conversion feature in Excel … was altering gene names that it considered to look like dates. For example, the tumor suppressor DEC1 [Deleted in Esophageal Cancer 1] was being converted to ‘1-DEC.’ Figure 1 lists 30 gene names that suffer an analogous fate.

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There is another default conversion problem for RIKEN clone identifiers identifiers of the form nnnnnnnEnn, where n denotes a digit. These identifiers are comprised of the serial number of the plate that contains the library, information on plate status, and the address of the clone. A search … identified more than 2,000 such identifiers out of a total set of 60,770. For example, the RIKEN identifier “2310009E13” was converted irreversibly to the floating-point number “2.31E+13.” A non-expert user might well fail to notice that approximately 3% of the identifiers on a microarray with tens of thousands of genes had been converted to an incorrect form, yet the potential for 2,000 identifiers to be transmogrified without notice is a considerable concern. Most important, these conversions to an internal date representation or floating-point number format are irreversible; the original gene name cannot be recovered.

Is this the article that made all bioinformaticians turn to R?