Pallen et al. Candidatus names and GTDB updates

Bacterial Taxonomy
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Hi Donovan, Phil

Thanks greatly for GTDB and all the hard work that’s gone into it. It is a marvellous resource!

I support using the term Candidatus being included. I assume you will include the Candidatus names proposed by Mark Pallen and his colleagues at the Quadrum Institute? Only 65000 to include…

This will be a little bit of an earthquake in microbial taxonomy and will be interesting to see opinions especially with the names being autogenerated. A collective ICSP Subcommittee is being held tomorrow (chaired by Prof. Stephen On who is at Lincoln University in New Zealand) and this will likely be one of the topics discussed.

I should note that some of Pallen et al. Candidatus names are not aligned with data in LPSN. This is not easily seen unless active cross-referencing is done. This is the case for 19 names in the genera Duganella, Janthinobacterium, Massilia (all in family Burkholderiaceae) affecting relatively recent descriptions. I guess more are lurking as well but requires a lot of time to sort out unfortunately. Once the inconsistencies are identified I suspect they will be easy to fix but some of the Candidatus names will only have a very brief existence,

Regards

John

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Hi John

We will follow the lead of NCBI Taxonomy and LPSN for adoption of Marks names in the first instance. As you point out, it will be a massive change and we’re in a wait and see period to see if the names are adopted by the scientific community.

Bw, Phil

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