One Fungus = One Name: DNA and fungal nomenclature twenty years after PCR

Some fungi with pleomorphic life-cycles still bear two names despite more than 20 years of molecular phylogenetics that have shown how to merge the two systems of classification, the asexual “Deuteromycota” and the sexual “Eumycota”. Mycologists have begun to flout nomenclatorial regulations and use just one name for one fungus. The International Code of Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN) must change to accommodate current practice or become irrelevant. The fundamental difference in the size of fungi and plants had a role in the origin of dual nomenclature and continues to hinder the development of an ICBN that fully accommodates microscopic fungi. A nomenclatorial crisis also looms due to environmental sequencing, which suggests that most fungi will have to be named without a physical specimen. Mycology may need to break from the ICBN and create a MycoCode to account for fungi known only from environmental nucleic acid sequence (i.e. ENAS fungi)

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

Fungal taxonomists pursue a seemingly impossible quest: to discover and give names to all of the world\u27s 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. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved