Sir

You are to be commended for devoting a leading article1 to the nomenclature problems affecting molecular biology. The text is, however, misleading in its implication that molecular biologists have no recourse to an official international committee that addresses matters of nomenclature.

The IUPAC-IUBMB Joint Commission of Biochemical Nomenclature (JCBN)2 produces recommendations to aid communication of biochemical and molecular biological information and encourages scientists to use generally understood terminology. The committee is also responsible for Enzyme Nomenclature , the enzyme classification system used in several important electronic databases (see 3–5 for examples).

Problems of nomenclature are already seriously hampering biological research and information retrieval from public databases. If molecular biologists and biochemists are willing to tackle this important area, they should be reminded that JCBN has an established infrastructure to address nomenclature problems and is forming strong initiatives in the field of bioinformatics. The committee already has representatives from Swiss-Prot5 and the Nucleic Acid Database6 and is seeking to extend its interests because of the immensity of the problems faced.

The committee welcomes initiatives from groups in the research community to organize nomenclature within specialist areas, and is willing to advise on the design of nomenclature systems that conform to the conventions of IUPAC-IUBMB. All that is required is satisfactory financial backing, cooperation from the scientific community and a willingness to improve effective access to the large amount of data being generated.