Talk:Fasciculin

Dear Proteopedikers,

Fasciculin variants require Arabic numerals (i.e., fasciculin 1, 2, 3 or Fas1, Fas2, Fas3), not Roman numerals (FasI, FasII, FasIII).

Reason #1 is that this is the way they were named by their finders and are not supposed to be renamed at random.

Reason #2 is that the choice of Arabic versus Roman numerals when naming a peptidic toxin is not only based on the godfather's choice but, instead, relates to a code shared by toxinologists during the previous century. Indeed, in these "ancient times" the first step of toxin purification from a whole venom involved gel-filtration, leading to rough fractions numbered with Roman numerals, then re-chromatography of these fractions by ion exchange, leading to fractions numbered with Arabic numerals. For those cases where a third step was required, lower-case letters were added after the Arabic numeral.

I admit that this code might sound out of date now that more sophisticated means such as HPLC etc are used for toxin purification. Yet, simply from their names, an "ancient" toxinologist knows that fasciculins Fas1 and Fas2 were separated from each other by ion exchange chromatography...