Viral Nomenclature

"This is Dr. Scanlan.  He's a virologist, but he does a decent impersonation of a microbiologist."

With that, I was introduced to my professor for Clinical Parasitology and Virology, Clinical Mycology, and Clinical Bacteriology.

Now, the ASCP board exam is recognized internationally.  This means we had to learn every fungus, virus, parasite, and bacterium the world over.  Because how hard can that possibly be?

The fun part came during virology.  As our professor was a virologist, we may have exceeded the national average for depth of coverage.  Including vectors, transmission, treatment, morbidity and mortality,  we had to know the following aspects of each virus (how many can there possibly be, right?): envelope, structure, segmentation, sense, strands, and genetic material.

You try remembering that Rhabdovirus is a enveloped, helical, non-segmented, negative-sense, single-stranded, RNA virus while Bunyavirus is an enveloped, helical, segmented, negative-sense, single-stranded RNA virus.

After several days of beating my head against the wall, the night before the test, I came to the following realization:  all these are binary choices.  Being the nerd I am, I simply put them into a table:

	1	0
Envelope	Enveloped	Non-enveloped
Structure	Icosahedral	Helical
Segmentation	Segmented	Non-segmented
Sense	Positive-sense	Negative-sense
Strands	Double-stranded	Single-stranded
Material	DNA	RNA

From there, I punched it into a spreadsheet:

Virus	Aspect						Total
	Envelope	Structure	Segmentation	Sense	Strands	Material
Rhabdovirus	1	0	0	0	0	0	32
Rhinovirus	0	1	0	1	0	0	20
Bunyavirus	1	0	1	0	0	0	40
St. Louis Encephalitis Virus	1	1	0	1	0	0	52

Now, all I had to remember is the table and a single number for each virus.

Presumably, one might be able to add other non-binary attributes to this system, using an alphabetical prefix or suffix, i.e. affected systems (Respiratory =A, GI=B, Integumentary=C.) or mode of transmission (Droplet=A, Vector=B, etc.).  This would yield a result of CB43 for a theoretical enveloped, helical, segmented, negative-sense, double-stranded DNA virus causing boils and spread by a tick.

And if you think that I'm the only one who could possibly find this system useful, I would point out that the President of the APSU 2007-8 Medical Technology Class noticed me using my table the morning of the test and had the whole system and all the numbers memorized in under two hours.

So there it is, the Pedde Binary Virus Nomenclature system.  Free of charge for all APSU Med Tech students, however, I will cry foul if anyone publishes a paper on it without giving me a chance to co-author.