Accessible language and clear expression.
Our primary concern is to facilitate communication of advances in genetic research in a clear and accessible fashion so that scientists across a broad range of disciplines will be able to appreciate their worth. It is in your interests to ensure that your manuscript is written in this manner throughout, paying especial attention to the abstract and first few paragraphs. Editorial suggestions from colleagues who do not necessarily have expertise in the immediate area of focus can be most helpful in this regard, and should be sought.
Nomenclature.
Proposed gene symbols must be registered with the appropriate nomenclature committee. Use our nomenclature guide at http://genetics.nature.com/web_specials/nomen/ for live links to the URL of the appropriate nomenclature committee -- for example, the HUGO nomenclature committee and the mouse genome database. Check that other gene symbols are registered using the appropriate website database. Many symbols currently in popular use (for example, p53) are aliases; the correct gene symbol should be used at all times.
Materials.
As a condition of publication, authors are required to make materials and methods used freely available to academic researchers for their own use. Authors are required to state in the methods section any conditions for use of materials, and to provide full disclosure of the conditions on a freely accessible, identified web site.
This requirement includes antibodies and the constructs used to make transgenic animals, but not the animals themselves. Mutant strains of mice generated without the use of constructs must be submitted to a public repository at the time of publication, unless authors can ensure prompt distribution to academic researchers on request.
Papers reporting protein or DNA sequences and crystallographic structures will not be accepted without an accession number to GenBank/EMBL/DDBJ, Brookhaven, SWISS-PROT or other appropriate, identified, publicly available database in general use in the field that gives free access to researchers from the date of publication (see Nature 394, 105; 1998 and 404, 317; 2000). Accession numbers are provided directly to authors by these databases on deposition of data, and must be included in the Nature paper before publication. Microarray data should be made freely available to academic researchers on authors' own web sites or other freely available web site (the URL to be provided in the paper) until a public database is available.
Other supporting data sets must be made available to any interested reader on the publication date from the authors directly.
Researchers who encounter a persistent refusal by an author of a Nature paper to comply with these guidelines should contact the Editor of Nature Genetics, at natgen@natureny.com. (See Nature 416, 1; 2002 .)
Accession numbers.
Accession numbers should be provided in a separate section at the end of Methods, rather than in the text and figure legends.
Copyright.
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Commentaries & Progresses are approximately 2,000-3,000 words in length with about 50 references. The article should begin with an abstract of 100-200 words summarizing the content and scope of the article. Concise subheadings should be used to introduce distinct sections and to navigate the reader through the article. The use of figures and cartoons is strongly encouraged; these can be used to illustrate a point, explain a concept, summarize research findings or simply for aesthetic appeal.
, instead of "solid circle").