Buzzwordomics

I see Lars Juhl Jensen has come up with a fun tag cloud of recently popular buzzwords in the biosciences. He calls it a BuzzCloud. The buzzword from the cloud I've noticed most lately is "Quantative Proteomics" ... quantitation is a good goal for the field of proteomics to aim for, since IMHO it doesn't really deserve the -omics prefix. "Omics" tends to imply the possibility of global proteome coverage, which proteomic studies rarely, if ever, achieve. But enough of the side-rants.

The way Lars' BuzzCloud is constructed by extracting phrases ending in -ics, -ology, -omy, -phy, -chemistry, -medicine, or -sciences etc reminded me of a stupid little CGI application I wrote a few years back ... the Biotech company name generator. When you take common prefixes like "Gene-", "Pept-" or "Chemi-" and suffixes like "-omics" or "-agen" etc, it's amazing how often Googling the name turns up a real honest-to-goodness biotech company.

Feel free to comment on any "biotechie" suffixes and prefixes that I should add ... the hardcoded list in the script isn't that long.