Plant Pathology is Lost Without Taxonomy

Abstract

outlines the current trends in fungal taxonomy and the implications for plant pathology FUNGAL TAXONOMY

An enhanced graph-oriented approach for change management in distributed biomedical ontologies and linked data

“…The morphological conceptualization of fungi is not sufficient, and will no longer work because all of the names based only on morphology must be re-evaluated. Also, the phylogeneticbased conceptualization has its own limitations, since the decision of where to draw the line between different species is not always easy to make [12].…”

Epitypification of Tilletia ehrhartae, a smut fungus with potential for nature conservation, biosecurity and biocontrol

“…A number of smut fungi are however also important to different aspects of human life and economy, being devastating pathogens of cultivated crops or ornamental plants. The clear application of correct names for plant pathogens having an impact on plant production and the economy is of primary interest for phytopathologists (Crous 2005;Wingfield et al 2012). However, morphology often does not provide sufficient resolution for an unambiguous identification of species.…”

Categorical Representation of Evolving Structure of an Ontology for Clinical Fungus

“…Most fungal names are not stable and change with time. Fungal names reflect the data about organisms and as our understanding of the relationships among taxa increases, names will be forced to change so that they do not implicitly contradict the data [15]. Most names are currently based on the phenotype (visible characteristics of organism).…”

“…As more data become available, however, we run into various problematic issues, such as convergent evolution, seen as the evolution of the same form in different families and even orders, so that similar anamorphs (the imperfect (asexual) state of a fungus)) may have completely different, unrelated teleomorphs (the sexual stage in the life cycle of a fungus; considered the perfect stage). These names then have to change, as they no longer convey the correct information to the user [15]. These name changes may cause confusion and affect the validity of different queries.…”

“…The morphological conceptualization is not sufficient, and will no longer work because all names based only on morphology have to be re-evaluated. In addition, the phylogenetic based conceptualization also has its own limitations, as sometimes the decision of where to draw the line between different species is not easy to make [15]. Another issue in fungal taxonomies is dual nomenclature (two names for one organism) due to the anamorph/teleomorph debate [15].…”