[Data-modeling] Hormone type in the Medicine domain

[Brian Karlak]

On Apr 15, 2008, at 5:07 PM, Faye Li wrote:

> Also, is a Hormone Receptor always or pretty much always a Gene? We  
> have
> a Gene type in the Biology domain that I'd be more than happy to add  
> as
> an Included Type if it makes sense. Medical review of the type and
> property names would also be appreciated.

Hi Faye --

Hormone Receptors are all proteins, which in turn are encoded for by  
genes.  However, the distinction is often blurred in common usage  
since there is a rough one-to-one correspondence between a gene and  
and its protein product.  Furthermore, genes often share the same name  
as their protein product.

Even though common usage often confuses the two concepts, it would  
probably be incorrect to cotype all Hormone Receptors as Genes.  It  
would be more correct to cotype them as Proteins.

Unfortunately, it seems that Wikipedia usually confuses the two  
concepts in their articles.  For instance, the A2a Receptor blurb  
starts with:

The adenosine A receptor, also known as ADORA2A, is an adenosine  
receptor, but also denotes the human gene encoding it.

It appears that we have continued this conflation of Gene and Protein  
in freebase.  I see instances where we (automatically) type these  
entries as a Gene.  This irks the bio geek in me.  For common use this  
will work, but any biological application that tries to use this info  
will get tangled up pretty quick.

Because of this, I'd recommend against the automatic cotyping of  
Hormone Receptor with Gene, unless we're comfortable propagating this  
issue.

One final suggestion: you should probably name your type "Hormone",  
instead of "Human Hormone".  Most (if not all) of your entries are  
hormones in a wide variety of species.  Dogs, mice and deer all  
produce prolactin and insulin, all for pretty much the same purpose.

Brian

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