Appendix 2 – Orthography

Capitalization of genes and proteins

Nomenclature for human genes and proteins is as follows:

• Gene symbols are uppercase and italicized, e.g. STAT1

• Protein symbols are uppercase and roman, e.g. STAT1

mRNAs and cDNAs follow the same formatting conventions.

Verb inflection – S/Z

I have opted to use British English spelling in general, except for the s/z situation with verbs. This is not the same as the Oxford English standard, which opts for ‘z’ with ‘ize’ but ‘s’ with ‘yse’.

I have chosen the Z-form for two reasons:

1. In the scientific world, a lot of words descend from Greek. Therefore, there are a fair few words in English which suffer from ambiguous suffixing. An example, in fact the primary reason for choosing ‘z’ in this report, is the word ‘analysis’. Plural of -sis is -ses; and third person inflection of -se is -ses. Thus, we regularly meet the ambiguous word analyses which, whilst contextually discernible, may not be immediately clear upon scanning, nor to non-native English readers whose native language grammar is substantially different.

2. Additionally, the Oxford University recommendation is for ‘z’ usage to follow the etymological source of the word: words that came from French, or arrived through French, maintain the s; words which came directly from Greek take the ‘z’ form, as verbs in Greek are suffixed with -ιζειν (-izein). In practice, this is highly inefficient, as the list of words which should keep the s is only about 200 in size; moreover, I have not been able to find the list published anywhere online.

Following the convention of z over s provides a generally safer way to ensure disambiguation between plural nouns and third-person verbs, especially in scientific writing which often uses the third-person it pronoun and verb inflection when describing the function of tools, devices, services, platforms, etc.

Consistency of suffixing all possible verbs with z instead of s provides the reader with the certainty that an irregular plural noun is indeed a noun when they read it, instead of pausing to wonder if it could instead be a third-person inflected verb. This is especially useful for non-native readers.