What is the definition of LOC# identifier?

Question

[aleix.arnau1990]

Hi,

Could someone give me the definition of LOC# identifiers and where can I found it? I cannot find any place with the criteria to give to a gene an identifier such as LOC#.

Thanks!

[Adrian Pelin]

I may be wrong, but when I do it I just use the first basepair position within the contig/chromosome of the gene.

[aleix.arnau1990]

I think you post your answer in a wrong place.

Answer 1

[Giovanni M Dall'Olio]

From the NCBI book:

Symbols beginning with LOC. When a published symbol is not available, and orthologs have not yet been determined, Gene will provide a symbol that is constructed as 'LOC' + the GeneID. This is not retained when a replacement symbol has been identified, although queries by the LOC term are still supported. In other words, a record with the symbol LOC12345 is equivalent to GeneID = 12345. So if the symbol changes, the record can still be retrieved on the web using LOC12345 as a query, or from any file using GeneID = 12345.