C'est ne pas un proteosomeThey’ve done it again! The online table of contents for today’s issue of Science has an article on a ubiquitin ligase 1 and the editors have added this helpful blurb:

In developing worms, the pruning of excess synapses requires proteosome-mediated protein degradation and is selectively prevented by a neural adhesion molecule.

No, no, no, no, no! There’s no such word as “proteosome“! It’s “proteasome“. It’s a horribly common mistake (PubMed has 7280 cites for the misspelled version, and 11813 for the correct spelling — a ratio that’s actually nearly ten times worse than the generic web’s)  2 but it’s a mistake nonetheless.

This is far from the first time Science has done this3 and I wrote to them the last time they did it, which was in June for the teaser “Selective Proteosomes”. I wrote to them again today, but I’m not optimistic; the misspelled version from June is still there.

Some editor at Science needs a sharp smack upside the head.

 

  1. Spatial Regulation of an E3 Ubiquitin Ligase Directs Selective Synapse Elimination. Mei Ding, Dan Chao, George Wang, and Kang Shen. Science 17 August 2007: 947-951. [↩]
  2. Google claims “about 240,000″ hits for -o- and 2,990,000 for -a-, a 12:1 ratio compared to the presumably more technical literature’s 1.6:1 ratio.[↩]
  3. 82 hits in Pubmed for “Proteosome AND science[Journal]“![↩]