# Pls welcome Gaga germanotta and Gaga monstraparva! **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [February 6, 2013, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445 "2013-02-06T02:38:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![deltasigma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e5b9ba/32.png) [@deltasigma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/deltasigma)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2013, 2:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445/1 "2013-02-06T02:38:14Z")
[Botanists are just weird.](http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/hollyworld/gaga-germanotta-gaga-monstraparva-ferns-lady-gaga) But then there’s a [Sonic Hedgehog gene](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog) after all. And who named quarks? Well, since GAGA is the nucleotide sequence guanine-adenine-guanine-adenine, you had to figure something like this was inevitable. > [@](#): > > Gaga germanotta and Gaga monstraparva, two new fern genuses discovered by botanists at Duke, have been named after Lady Gaga. > A graduate student found that the plant’s DNA base pair has a sequence of GAGA, which initially inspired the naming. The genus also has “somewhat fluid definitions of gender,” since its spores can reproduce to be male, female, or both, [the New York Times reported](http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/23/germinated-this-way-new-fern-species-named-after-lady-gaga/). ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2013, 3:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445/2 "2013-02-06T03:24:34Z")
Great. The times article also mentions a species of fly with a golden butt that was named after Beyonce. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2013, 3:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445/3 "2013-02-06T03:56:01Z")
Sonic hedgehog was named after the game/character, but the name is not random and is based on the earlier hedgehog protein. Quarks were named by Murray Gell-Mann after a passage in _Finnegans Wake_, by Joyce. So basically nonsense. 🙂 Nothing to do with _Star Trek_. The pronunciation is a strange issue. I like these when they actually have a tenuous link the the person conceptually, rather than because the namer likes this person. This example is so-so. I think there would be many better examples of the gender ambiguous to name it after. ---
**Author:** ![deltasigma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e5b9ba/32.png) [@deltasigma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/deltasigma)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2013, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445/4 "2013-02-06T04:27:24Z")
You have to like monstraparva meaning (I think) “little monsters”, which is how LG refers to her fans. 🙂 edit: about quarks, I was thinking about charm, strange, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Silophant](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a698b9/32.png) [@Silophant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Silophant)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2013, 4:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445/5 "2013-02-06T04:33:22Z")
Maybe I know even less about genetics than I think I do, but since there’s only 4 bases, and each DNA strand is millions of bases long, wouldn’t almost all organisms have a GAGA sequence somewhere in their genome? ---
**Author:** ![deltasigma](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e5b9ba/32.png) [@deltasigma](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/deltasigma)\ **Post date:** [February 6, 2013, 4:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/pls-welcome-gaga-germanotta-and-gaga-monstraparva/649445/6 "2013-02-06T04:48:25Z")
Yes. And it’s especially off since you only need 3 bases to encode a protein (codon). If I’m reading the chart right, [GAG codes for glutamic acid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code#RNA_codon_table).