Taxacom: Big changes / increases in virus taxonomy - who knew?

Wed Jan 15 22:48:09 CST 2025

Hi,

It is certainly a massive change moving to a (pseudo)binomial system.
I spoke with one of the guys who is the chair of an ICTV 'study group' and he explained it to me, but it seemed to me a compromise to keep almost everyone happy with four different ways of forming names (for plant viruses at least). The ICTV website is quite good, although some digging is needed for historic synonymy.

I have not yet got the courage to update all of the virus names for NZ, but it will be a big project, for example 'Grapevine Syrah virus-1' is now Marafivirus syrahense:

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Bevan

-----Original Message-----
From: Taxacom <taxacom-bounces at lists.ku.edu> On Behalf Of Tony Rees via Taxacom
Sent: Thursday, 16 January 2025 4:38 pm
To: taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
Subject: Taxacom: Big changes / increases in virus taxonomy - who knew?

Dear Taxacomers,

I recently came to update the virus taxonomy in IRMNG (last updated from the 2018 ICTV list) only to discover that not only had there been an explosion in higher taxonomic ranks including completely new taxa at realm and virus-only kingdom levels, but the number of accepted genera has blown out from under 900 to over 3,000 in the intervening 6 or so years, to say nothing of species. Current statistics from https://nam10.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fictv.global%2Ftaxonomy&data=05%7C02%7Ctaxacom%40lists.ku.edu%7Ce0e784be7b1041b4523808dd35e8fda0%7C3c176536afe643f5b96636feabbe3c1a%7C0%7C0%7C638725998584152124%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C60000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=Al2JVSjS71YpCLzMeQgX8NXQeYjUQlthBo1eIPinhX8%3D&reserved=0
read:
----------
Virus Taxonomy: 2023 Release
EC 55, Jena, Germany, August 2023
Email ratification April 2024 (MSL #39); release v4, October 30, 2024
6 realms, 10 kingdoms, 18 phyla, 2 subphyla, 41 classes, 81 orders, 11 suborders, 314 families, 200 subfamilies, 3522 genera, 84 subgenera, 14690 species
----------
Cited reference works on the ICTV website include such exemplars as:
Muscatt G, Kuhn JH, Millard A, Bending GD, Jameson E, 2023 "Create 418 new genera and 1,706 new species in the class Leviviricetes, move and rename 375 species, and abolish 114 genera and 48 species."

As apparent from this example, a number of previously recognised genera have also been abolished (more than 350 at my count) with species reassigned elsewhere in the main, in most cases to other newly erected genera (the concepts of typification and date priority do not appear to be invoked in the virus world), although in a subset of cases the genus name has simply been changed to a newer one for any of several reasons, with the old genus name treated as a synonym of the newer one.

At any rate this keeps workers such as myself, attempting to track such changes in our own system (albeit with a few years' latency), not short of a job or several. As an aside, I note that NCBI taxonomy as well as Catalogue of Life do appear to have taken these changes on board sooner than myself. One might hope - optimistically perhaps - that the rate of change might tail off a bit now that these massive changes have taken place, but who knows... Any other comments welcome,

Regards Tony

Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
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