Some sage advice on avoiding confusing names for bioinformatics tools

SAGE is a molecular technique used to investigate the mRNA population from a chosen sample. It stands for Serial Analysis of Gene Expression and was first described back in 1995. The technique spawned spin-offs such as LongSAGE, RL-SAGE (Really Long SAGE), and SuperSAGE.

Although this technique has largely been superseded by other methods (such as RNA-Seq), it is still widely referenced (over 1,300 publications from 2013 mention this technique).

Fast-forward to the present day and I note that a new tool has just been published in the journal BMC Bioinformatics:

SAGE: String-overlap Assembly of GEnomes

As long as you query your favorite web search engine for some combination of 'SAGE' and 'genome assembly' you will probably find this tool and not end up on one of the half a million pages that talk about the other SAGE. I'm still not sure whether it is a bit risky giving a new tool the same name as such an established molecular technique.

All of this means that there is the potential for a certain company to use the aforementioned molecular technique to help annotate the output of the aforementioned computational technique, and apply both of these techniques to data from a certain plant. This could give you the world's first SAGE, SAGE, SAGE, sage genome!