Talk:Nucleic acid notation

This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Peer reviewers: Jkenchel.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 01:44, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

This whole article is an advertisement for ambiscript. It's disgusting. I am not saying ambiscript is not a smart development, but just that this is not written from a neutral point of view. And besides, who uses it anyway? Color coded bases and automatic reverse complement functions are standard in any software package. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Cachurro (talk • contribs) 9 December 2011‎

There's just one short paragraph about it way at the bottom. It seems like an appropriate amount of coverage to me. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 20:29, 10 December 2011 (UTC)

The reference for ambiscript ("Status of Endoceroid Classification") must be wrong. JS Hoyer (talk) 18:40, 7 October 2013 (UTC)

The description field do not look correct which currently translates to adenosine, cytidine, guanosine, thymidine. Looking in Nucleoside, some bases are Ribonucleoside, and some are Deoxyribonucleosides. I would have thought they should all be Nitrogenous bases. Searching on google for other bioinformatics IUPAC codes suggests a name change is required for those bases.

• http://www.ebi.ac.uk/2can/tutorials/aa.html
• http://www.dna.affrc.go.jp/misc/MPsrch/InfoIUPAC.html

This table has also propogated into Nucleotide. Is there a valid reason why they are a mixture?

--Zven (talk) 09:44, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, the table currently contains the names of the ribonucleosides but refers to bases. That should be fixed. In practice, the letters also used for the deoxyribonucleosides, nucleotides, and bases when the context is clear. Antony–22 (^talk⁄_contribs) 19:38, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm no biochemist, but I think I recognize a logical error when I see one: The entries in the last column in the "IUPAC notation" table, called "Complement" seem to have several errors.

I take "complement" to mean "set complement", a concept from the theory of (finite) sets. If this is correct, then the first row of the table encodes the powerset of {A,C,G,T}, and the last column should be their (set) complements, using the same encoding:

   B,D,H,V,S,W,K,M,Y,R,A,C,G,T,Z,N

And if this isn't the correct interpretation of "complement", then can somebody please provide the correct/coherent definition. (Hint, an incoherent answer would be: hydrogen-bonding/base-pairing complement--like A/T and C/G--because it does not make sense for rows with more than one base.) — Preceding unsigned comment added by ScriboErgoSum (talk • contribs) 00:16, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

For rows with several bases, there is an ambiguity symbol (e.g. R for A and G). The complementary ambiguity symbol for R is Y because it is the ambiguity symbol for the bases T (i.e., the complementary base of the initial A) and C (i.e., the complementary base of the initial G). Manudouz (talk) 21:28, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

@ScriboErgoSum: "Compliment" here has nothing to do with "set complement". See Complementarity (molecular biology). Nosferattus (talk) 16:59, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

Nucleic acid nomenclature seems to overlap with this one. As it is short, I support the 2021 proposal to merge it to here. Klbrain (talk) 23:16, 4 April 2022 (UTC)

  Y Merge completed Klbrain (talk) 00:23, 31 August 2022 (UTC)

By common sense, W should be complements with S and S should be complements with W but the table puts W with W and S with S. SnappyRiffs (talk) 03:20, 27 November 2024 (UTC)

W is the ambiguity symbol for A and T. The corresponding complementary bases are T and A. The complementary ambiguity symbol therefore remains W. This is similar with S, the ambiguity symbol for C and G. The corresponding complementary bases are G and C, and the complementary ambiguity symbol remains S. Manudouz (talk) 08:09, 25 September 2025 (UTC)