Comments to the first nomenclature of human cytology: the description of cells and their ultrastructure in the Terminologia Histologica. Which important medical and biological terms are disputable or missing?
Abstrakt
An official and internationally accepted cytological nomenclature has been absent until now. The first internationally accepted nomenclature Terminologia Histologica - International Terms for Human Cytology and Histology, published more than 10 years ago was authored by an ensemble of experts who worked under the auspices of the Federative International Committee on Anatomical Terminology.
Terminologia Histologica is a new standard in human cell and tissue terminology. This nomenclature opens with a section dedicated to human cells entitled "Cytologia - Cytology".
There are more than 500 terms listed in this section. All Latin terms are accompanied by English equivalents.
With regard to synonyms for each term, several have one, two, or, rarely, three. In this opinion article, after a systematic and in-depth analysis of this current internationally accepted cytological nomenclature, we discuss about a missing important cytological terms (e.g., morphological types of nucleoli or mitochondria), missing often used synonymic terms, redundant and unused terms as well as about another disputable terms (e.g., "pigment granules" are in fact membrane-bound vesicles, therefore, the terminology should be changed to "vesicula pigmenti").
We hope that this opinion article will develop a wide scientific discussion before the publication of the second edition, so perhaps the mentioned minor flaws will be corrected, so the new edition of the Terminologia Histologica will become truly an internationally accepted communication tool for most of histologists, including cell biologists.