Up to now, the emphasis of the text-mining techniques employed by LBD tools has been on the correct identification of biomedical terms in text. Most approaches use the UMLS Metathesaurus as the source of terms. When deploying LBD in a genomics context, this may be a limiting factor because the coverage of gene and proteins in the UMLS is low. [...] Unambiguously recognising gene symbols, however, is not straightforward as many gene symbols refer to one or more genes or other meanings. Wren partly solves this in IRIDESCENT by matching the gene’s acronym to its accompanying full name. Literature-based discovery tools should benefit from recent research in identifying gene names41 and their disambiguation.