SPITFIRE is the Southampton Partnership for Innovative Training of Future Investigators Researching the Environment](http://projects.noc.ac.uk/spitfire/), which is a doctoral training partnership (i.e. PhD programme) run out of the University of Southampton. The Supermarine spitfire is a well-known World War II British fighter plane developed by the Supermarine Aviation Works at Southampton. SPITFIRE therefore rates as an elite pre hoc acronym - and an impressively contrived one, at that.
FATE - Future of Australia’s Threatened Ecosystems - is a project somewhat linked to the last post, CREATE and for some time was also housed at University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney, Australia. It has since moved to the University of Sydney and I am struggling to find much more about it. The best so far comes from the webpage of Peter Ampt at U. Sydney:
For the past 6 years I have managed the Future of Australia’s Threatened Ecosystems (FATE) Program which began at the Australian Museum, moved to UNSW and is now to Sydney University. It is the brainchild of Professor Mike Archer and aims to explore the sustainable use of native species and ecosystems to generate conservation benefits. FATE has concentrated on the management and commercial harvest of kangaroos including consumer attitudes to eating kangaroo meat, the opportunities and barriers to achieving conservation through sustainable use, the feasibility of the use on native mammals as pets and the potential of regional bio-energy strategies to drive improved natural resource management through native agroforestry.
Fate… the future… I think that deserves a pre hoc classification.
CREATE - the Coalition for Research into the Evolution of Australian Terrestrial Ecosystems is a foundation run by my faculty (Science) at the University of New South Wales:
The CREATE fund has been established to provide a focus for studies into the evolution of Australia’s Ecosystems, concentrating on the last 100 million years.
The main emphasis is on the lessons that can be learned from the past and how these can provide an understanding of the present and the key to our future.
I think that CREATE counts as ad hoc but given that the products of their research constitute a stream of explanatory problems for Creationists, perhaps it is an ironic backronym!
COLBERT - the Combined Operational Load-Bearing External Resistance Treadmill - is the device used by astronauts on the International Space Station to keep fit. The NASA treadmill was originally called the T-2 but was renamed:
NASA selected the treadmill’s name after comedian and host Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” took interest during the Node 3 naming census and urged his followers to post the name “Colbert,” which received the most entries.
The acronym was engineered to fit the initials in a kind of inverse post hoc fashion (where the relevance of the acronym is added after its construction). In fact, COLBERT represents a new class of acronym to ORCA: the "Backcronym". (It was the Backcronym wikipedia page where I came across COLBERT, in fact.)
ACHOO - Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst - syndrome is another name for Photic sneeze reflex. This is the condition that affects around a fifth to a third of the population in which stimuli such as bright lights trigger uncontrolled sneezing. (Also known as “sun sneezing”.)
According to the source from which I discovered ACHOO, the ABC Science Weekly Update, it is “a funny acronym invented by doctors to help them remember the essentials of the photic sneeze reflex!” Personally, I think that “Photic sneeze reflex” is clearer than “Autosomal dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst”! I suspect they were just having a bit of fun but, either way, it gets the coveted pre hoc status for such a well-aligned (if somewhat over contrived) acronym. (It’s just a shame about the “dominant” bit, which, ironically is probably the most likely bit to be forgotten!)
See the entry for RAVER. These guys had clearly tried so hard to contrive an acronym that was a dictionary word (surely it should really be ASSEAT?) that I thought they deserved their own entry.
ASSET - Accelerated Segment Switch in Exons to alter Targeting:
Doley R, Mackessy SP & Kini RM (2009).Role of accelerated segment switch in exons to alter targeting (ASSET) in the molecular evolution of snake venom proteins. BMC Evol Biol. 9:146.
Things are beginning to settle after my recent move to Australia and today’s PubCrawler alert contained a reminder that ORCA had been somewhat neglected over the past few weeks:
RAVER - Rapid Accumulation of Variations in Exposed Residues - is the acronym given to a new theory to explain the molecular evolution of “three-finger” (snake) toxins:
Sunagar K, Jackson TN, Undheim EA, Ali SA, Antunes A & Fry BG (2013). Three-Fingered RAVERs: Rapid Accumulation of Variations in Exposed Residues of Snake Venom Toxins. Toxins (Basel) 5(11):2172-2208.
Three-finger toxins (3FTx) represent one of the most abundantly secreted and potently toxic components of colubrid (Colubridae), elapid (Elapidae) and psammophid (Psammophiinae subfamily of the Lamprophidae) snake venom arsenal. Despite their conserved structural similarity, they perform a diversity of biological functions. Although they are theorised to undergo adaptive evolution, the underlying diversification mechanisms remain elusive. Here, we report the molecular evolution of different 3FTx functional forms and show that positively selected point mutations have driven the rapid evolution and diversification of 3FTx. These diversification events not only correlate with the evolution of advanced venom delivery systems (VDS) in Caenophidia, but in particular the explosive diversification of the clade subsequent to the evolution of a high pressure, hollow-fanged VDS in elapids, highlighting the significant role of these toxins in the evolution of advanced snakes. We show that Type I, II and III α-neurotoxins have evolved with extreme rapidity under the influence of positive selection. We also show that novel Oxyuranus/Pseudonaja Type II forms lacking the apotypic loop-2 stabilising cysteine doublet characteristic of Type II forms are not phylogenetically basal in relation to other Type IIs as previously thought, but are the result of secondary loss of these apotypic cysteines on at least three separate occasions. Not all 3FTxs have evolved rapidly: κ-neurotoxins, which form non-covalently associated heterodimers, have experienced a relatively weaker influence of diversifying selection; while cytotoxic 3FTx, with their functional sites, dispersed over 40% of the molecular surface, have been extremely constrained by negative selection. We show that the a previous theory of 3FTx molecular evolution (termed ASSET) is evolutionarily implausible and cannot account for the considerable variation observed in very short segments of 3FTx. Instead, we propose a theory of Rapid Accumulation of Variations in Exposed Residues (RAVER) to illustrate the significance of point mutations, guided by focal mutagenesis and positive selection in the evolution and diversification of 3FTx.
This is really a twofer, as RAVER itself is proposed as a replacement for ASSET, which is pretty weak as fitting words to acronyms goes: ASSET - Accelerated Segment Switch in Exons to alter Targeting:
Doley R, Mackessy SP & Kini RM (2009).Role of accelerated segment switch in exons to alter targeting (ASSET) in the molecular evolution of snake venom proteins. BMC Evol Biol. 9:146.
Unless there are more snakes in banking or dance music than I realise, I think these must both be rated as ad hoc.
