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Fungal systematics: is a new age of enlightenment at hand?

Nature Reviews Microbiology volume 11, pages 129–133 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Fungal taxonomists pursue a seemingly impossible quest: to discover and give names to all of the world's mushrooms, moulds and yeasts. Taxonomists have a reputation for being traditionalists, but as we outline here, the community has recently embraced the modernization of its nomenclatural rules by discarding the requirement for Latin descriptions, endorsing electronic publication and ending the dual system of nomenclature, which used different names for the sexual and asexual phases of pleomorphic species. The next, and more difficult, step will be to develop community standards for sequence-based classification.

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Figure 1: Two names, one fungus.
Figure 2: Unnamed diversity.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank their colleagues and members of their laboratories for discussions on the principles of fungal taxonomy, and the International Mycological Association and the Centraalbureau voor Schimmelcultures for hosting meetings addressing the revolution in fungal nomenclature. Research in the authors' laboratories is supported by the Open Tree of Life Project (http://opentreeoflife.org/), the US National Science Foundation (grant DEB-1208719 to D.S.H.), the US National Institutes of Health (grant U54-AI65359 to J.T.W.) and the Energy Biosciences Institute (grant EBI 001J09 to J.W.T.).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. David S. Hibbett is at The Biology Department, Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts 01610, USA.,

    David S. Hibbett

  2. John W. Taylor is at The Department of Plant and Microbial Biology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.,

    John W. Taylor

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Correspondence to David S. Hibbett.

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GenBank

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Hibbett, D., Taylor, J. Fungal systematics: is a new age of enlightenment at hand?. Nat Rev Microbiol 11, 129–133 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrmicro2963

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