Formal description of sequence-based voucherless Fungi: promises and pitfalls, and how to resolve them.

ABSTRACT: There is urgent need for a formal nomenclature of sequence-based, voucherless Fungi, given that environmental sequencing has accumulated more than one billion fungal ITS reads in the Sequence Read Archive, about 1,000 times as many as fungal ITS sequences in GenBank. These unnamed Fungi could help to bridge the gap between 115,000 to 140,000 currently accepted and 2.2 to 3.8 million predicted species, a gap that cannot realistically be filled using specimen or culture-based inventories. The Code never aimed at placing restrictions on the nature of characters chosen for taxonomy, and the requirement for physical types is now becoming a constraint on the advancement of science. We elaborate on the promises and pitfalls of sequence-based nomenclature and provide potential

SUBMITTER: Lucking R 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6048566 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature