Usefulness of cytogenetic location

Question

[cdsouthan]

We are going through an outlink review at http://www.guidetopharmacology.org/

Hitherto we have manually marked up the cytogenetic locus for human, mouse and rat proteins

Is this information still useful for our database users or superseded by genomic coordinates?

Answer 1

[WouterDeCoster]

In my 'humble' opinion, it's rather useless to mention the cytogenetic location and it should be a crime if you don't mention the coordinates along with it... It's probably an artifact of pre-genomic times but people stick to it.

A side effect is that with a cytogenetic location you suggest an uncertainty about the exact location, while coordinates claim more certainty. Saying that a locus is on 12p13.2 kinda looks better than saying that a locus is "approximately somewhere around chr12:54654362-54854362".