Welcome to the Genenames Blog for the HGNC and the VGNC

We are the HUGO Gene Nomenclature Committee and our job is to make sure that scientists have a common language to use when discussing genes. We approve unique symbols and names for human loci, including protein coding genes, ncRNA genes and pseudogenes, to allow unambiguous scientific communication.

Symbols approved by locus type
Symbols approved by locus type

This is a figure from our recent NAR paper.

The purple region represents genes annotated with the non-protein-coding RNA locus group; the smaller chart shows the proportion of RNA genes annotated with each RNA-specific locus type. The ‘misc RNA’ category groups together RNA locus types that represent a small number of genes.

We have also been working with our collaborators at NCBI and Ensembl to try and standardise our locus types/biotypes between resources, based on Sequence Ontology terms. We hope to have an update on this later this year.

A full list of locus types, along with total numbers of approved symbols for each category, can be viewed at our Statistics and Downloads facility. You can also download by chromosome, or download our gene groups dataset. We’ll discuss our gene groups further in upcoming blog posts - this is a growing resource which we hope will be increasingly useful to the scientific community.

Also coming up….

We welcome any feedback or requests for articles about particular topics you would like to see covered. You can get in touch with us through the HGNC website, by emailing us or via Twitter @genenames.