TY - JOUR
T1 - Bacterial nomenclature in the era of genomics
AU - Pallen, M. J.
N1 - Funding Information:
Mark Pallen is supported by the Quadram Institute Bioscience BBSRC-funded Strategic Program: Microbes in the Food Chain (project no. BB/R012504/1 ) and its constituent project BBS/E/F/000PR10351 (Theme 3, Microbial Communities in the Food Chain) and by the Medical Research Council CLIMB-BIG-DATA grant MR/T030062/1 .
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The Author(s)
PY - 2021/11
Y1 - 2021/11
N2 - The remarkable success of taxonomic discovery, powered by culturomics, genomics and metagenomics, creates a pressing need for new bacterial names while holding a mirror up to the slow pace of change in bacterial nomenclature. Here, I take a fresh look at bacterial nomenclature, exploring how we might create a system fit for the age of genomics, playing to the strengths of current practice while minimizing difficulties. Adoption of linguistic pragmatism—obeying the rules while treating recommendations as merely optional—will make it easier to create names derived from descriptions, from people or places or even arbitrarily. Simpler protologues and a relaxed approach to recommendations will also remove much of the need for expert linguistic quality control. Automated computer-based approaches will allow names to be created en masse before they are needed while also relieving microbiologists of the need for competence in Latin. The result will be a system that is accessible, inclusive and digital, while also fully capable of naming the unnamed millions of bacteria.
AB - The remarkable success of taxonomic discovery, powered by culturomics, genomics and metagenomics, creates a pressing need for new bacterial names while holding a mirror up to the slow pace of change in bacterial nomenclature. Here, I take a fresh look at bacterial nomenclature, exploring how we might create a system fit for the age of genomics, playing to the strengths of current practice while minimizing difficulties. Adoption of linguistic pragmatism—obeying the rules while treating recommendations as merely optional—will make it easier to create names derived from descriptions, from people or places or even arbitrarily. Simpler protologues and a relaxed approach to recommendations will also remove much of the need for expert linguistic quality control. Automated computer-based approaches will allow names to be created en masse before they are needed while also relieving microbiologists of the need for competence in Latin. The result will be a system that is accessible, inclusive and digital, while also fully capable of naming the unnamed millions of bacteria.
KW - Bacterial nomenclature
KW - bacterial taxonomy
KW - bioinformatics
KW - metagenomics
KW - microbial genomics
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122695142&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.nmni.2021.100942
DO - 10.1016/j.nmni.2021.100942
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85122695142
SN - 2052-2975
VL - 44
JO - New Microbes and New Infections
JF - New Microbes and New Infections
M1 - 100942
ER -