I am not fond of new achronyms or ‘cool’ names, but then… guilty! you got me, I am contributing to the proliferation of four letters acronyms and fancy names like others! Lately, I have introduced a new one, HDIM as for Hyper-Dimensional Imaging Microscopy. But that is another story, and in a Supporting Note of that pre-print we explain our choice.
Earlier, we created the pHlameleons with the friend, my group leader back then, Fred Wouters. Well, first it was the Cameleon, the famous calcium reporter by the great Miyawaki and Tsien, brilliantly referred to as Camaleon because it is a protein that ‘changes colour’ upon binding calcium (Ca). Then it was the Clomeleon by Kuner and Augustine, as it senses cloride ions (Cl) rather then calcium. With all due respect for the authors, I must admit I did not love that name at first. Indeed, as we were deriving a family of pH sensors from yet another creation of Miyawaky (the CY11.5), we started to joke that we should have called this family of sensors the pHlameleons. Months after months, a joke ended up in a title of a paper, to be adopted as the name of these pH sensitive proteins. So, let’s not take ourselves too seriously too often. Sometimes we pick names for a bit of branding, other times to make our assays less heavy with too many technical terms, and other times, let’s just have fun with words (Clomeleon now for me is a great name, but I routinely joke about pHlameleons!).
Now that you know the little funny story about the pHlameleons, it is the turn of NyxSense and NyxBits. NyxSense is a software dedicated to multiplexing of FRET sensors. NyxBits are the components to create a multiplexing platform, a number of fluorescent proteins of distinct Stokes shift that can report, through their fluorescence lifetime, biochemical reactions probed via FRET with the use of dark/darker acceptor chromoproteins. A huge effort for us that took several years to bear fruit. Why Nyx?
During the revision of the drafts, colleagues found the manuscript a bit too technical and difficult to read. Thus I went back to pen and paper, google and wikipedia, to find a name that could help us to refer to this sensing platform with a single word rather then a sentence. Greek mythology always provides great inspiration and eventually, I discovered Nyx the primordial goddess of the night (Nox in the Roman mythology). With Erebus (personification of darkness), Nyx gives birth to Aether (personification of the upper air and brightness), Moros (deadly fate), Moirai (destiny) and Thanatos (death). Then, I felt that this short name, Nyx, is intimately connected with our work for three reasons.
First, Nyx seems to link darkness and light, the day and night, a nice analogy with our bright donor fluorophores and dark acceptors. Second, Nyx is related to death and fate. We created the NyxBits and NyxSense to study cell fate, and our first application is cell death responses to an anti-cancer drug. Third, Nyx is a goddess and as I am really committed to gender equality at work (not just by picking names of fluorophores), it felt a little bit in tune with what I do, to honour a female deity.
But do not take these reflections too seriously – I do not – after all I needed just a simple name for a very complex sensing platform. As there is no way for me to tell the reasoning behind the names in the manuscripts, I thought to share with you why we picked NyxSense and NyxBit, light-heartedly.
Now starting project Atlas… we’ll speak about this another time! 🙂
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