Musical encores in bioinformatics and other sciences

I've previously flagged a few examples of independently developed bioinformatics software tools that share the same name. My recent post about the JABBA-award winning software called MUSIC prompted some people to let me know that this is another name that has been used repeatedly by different groups.

So thanks to Nicolas Robine and commenter LMikeF, we can see that MUSIC is a very popular name for bioinformatics tools:

  1. MuSiC: a tool for multiple sequence alignment with constraints (2004)
  2. RE-MuSiC: a tool for multiple sequence alignment with regular expression constraints (2007)
  3. MuSiC: identifying mutational significance in cancer genomes (2012)
  4. MUSIC: Identification of Enriched Regions in ChIP-Seq Experiments using a Mappability-Corrected Multiscale Signal Processing Framework (2014)
  5. MUSiCC: Towards an accurate estimation of average genomic copy-numbers in the human microbiome (2014)

The first two publications sadly suffer from link rot and the provided URLs no longer work. These two publications are also by the same group, which begs the question, what would they call a 3rd iteration of their software (RE-RE-MuSiC?).

A little bit of additional searching reveals that MUSIC is a popular name in other scientific endeavors as well:

  1. MUSIC: MUltiScale Initial Conditions — software to generate initial conditions for cosmological simulations
  2. MUSIC: MUltiScale SImulation Code — fluid dynamics software: warning this website will make you nauseous!
  3. MUSIC: Muerte Subita en Insufficiencia Cardiaca — a longitudinal study to assess risk predictors of death inpatients with heart failure
  4. MUSIC: MUtation-based SQL Injection vulnerabilities Checking tool — a tool to help check for vulnerabilities in web based applications

I guess people like the name MUSIC and will go to almost any lengths to make an acronym/initialism for it.