Convience

I'd just like to stop in and state my appreciation for refrence numbers. While I do still fear the day they replace names we're all dehumanized a step further, I do like using them for microbes.

They're not human anyway, so you can't dehumanize them any more without first personifying them, and I'm way too busy to go through all that. And if you're going to say that it's degrading to make a number out of a living them, you can take heart knowing that the things I'm degrading are all pathogens. So they may be living things, but they're also jerks.

Anyway, the reason I like this practice is because it makes my job a lot easier. Take for example the pathogen: Salmonella enterica subsp. enterica serovar Choleraesuis str. SC-B67. Can you imagine having to make an entire file name for that, much less hundreds of equally long file names for all the other pathogens, plasmids, and strains? Thanks to the cold unfeeling magic of the refrence sequence I don't have to write that whole thing out, I just have to stamp it with Senterica(NC_006905) and be on my mery way..

Truly, that is convience