Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK; School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK; University of East Anglia, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK.
Quadram Institute Bioscience, Norwich Research Park, Norwich, UK.
Trends Microbiol. 2021 Apr;29(4):289-298. doi: 10.1016/j.tim.2020.10.009. Epub 2020 Dec 4.
Latin binomials, popularised in the 18th century by the Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, have stood the test of time in providing a stable, clear, and memorable system of nomenclature across biology. However, relentless and ever-deeper exploration and analysis of the microbial world has created an urgent need for huge numbers of new names for Archaea and Bacteria. Manual creation of such names remains difficult and slow and typically relies on expert-driven nomenclatural quality control. Keen to ensure that the legacy of Linnaeus lives on in the age of microbial genomics and metagenomics, we propose an automated approach, employing combinatorial concatenation of roots from Latin and Greek to create linguistically correct names for genera and species that can be used off the shelf as needed. As proof of principle, we document over a million new names for Bacteria and Archaea. We are confident that our approach provides a road map for how to create new names for decades to come.
拉丁双名法由瑞典自然学家林奈在 18 世纪推广，为生物学提供了一个稳定、清晰且易于记忆的命名系统，经受住了时间的考验。然而，对微生物世界的不懈且不断深入的探索和分析，使得需要为古菌和细菌创建大量新名称。此类名称的手动创建仍然困难且缓慢，并且通常依赖于专家驱动的命名质量控制。为了确保林奈的遗产在微生物基因组学和宏基因组学时代得以延续，我们提出了一种自动化方法，采用拉丁语和希腊语词根的组合连接，为属和种创建符合语法的名称，可根据需要随时使用。作为原理验证，我们为细菌和古菌创建了超过 100 万个新名称。我们有信心，我们的方法为未来几十年如何创建新名称提供了路线图。
