Taxonomy articles from across Nature Portfolio

The International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) has recently altered long-standing phylum names and given no guidance for taxonomy of uncultured or imperfectly cultured archaea and bacteria, disrupting progress towards a universal system of microbial taxonomy. Inclusion of new members into ICSP may help it to keep up to date.

By sieving through the plant genomic literature for the last 20 years, a study uncovered a disconnection between the research locales and plants’ native ranges. Colonialism, both past and present, might be behind this disparity.

The past two decades have seen a revolution in digital imaging techniques for capturing gross morphology, offering an unprecedented volume of data for biological research. Despite the rapid increase in scientific publications incorporating those images, the underlying datasets remain largely inaccessible. As the technical barriers to data sharing continue to fall, we face a more intimate, and perhaps more complicated, obstacle to open data – the one in our minds.