Comment Open access Published: 23 August 2016 Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature Mark Ziemann1, Yotam Eren1,2 & Assam El-Osta1,3 Genome Biology volume 17, Article number: 177 (2016) Cite this article The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading