NOMENCLATURE - BACKGROUND

A request was made at the April 1994 PDE meeting in Newport Beach for volunteers to form a committee whose purpose will be to help organize and as necessary revise a standardized system of nomenclature for existing and newly discovered isozymes of cyclic nucleotide PDEs. Investigators who have volunteered to help edit this list include all of the meeting organizers as well as several other scientists. Their names and addresses are listed at the end of this article. The group meets periodically at meetings having a major PDE component. If you would like to be included in this group and have published on PDEs please let one of the committee members know and your name will be added to the email list.

It was initially decided to utilize the electronic "mailbox" at ""gopher.hs.washington.edu"" OR ""gopher://www.hs.washington.edu/"" for this purpose. In 1996 the University of Washington decided not to routinely maintain this site so it was often not available. Therefore, we transferred most of the data to this WEB site. It is periodically updated. The major function for this site will be to provide an easily accessible source for the most current data concerning the names and descriptions of all cyclic nucleotide PDEs that are already known. In addition, authors wanting to have any new PDEs that they discover listed would be able to contact one of the committee members and have suggested an appropriate name based on the set of criteria listed below. Suggestions for changes also can be made directly to any of committee members. The criteria for naming are summarized in the following example for a theoretical new entry into the LOCUS field of GenBank.