A plea for caution before changing bacterial names in databases

Lesley Hoyles

Different taxonomic frameworks across LPSN, NCBI/EMBL/DDBJ and GTDB are causing big problems across (meta)genomic and cultivation studies. In a number of instances we've given up trying to describe novel species and validly publish names - especially for rare taxa - because life is too short and hands are too few to wade through the mess.

Olga Shapovalova

Since I work as a medical microbiology teacher

Anja Breuker

There has been an inflation of changing prokaryotic names.

Thøger Jensen

The latest taxonomical synonym is often not more correct than a previous valid published name.

Hidetoshi Urakawa

Taxonomy should facilitate scientific communication, not create confusion. The replacement of many long-established bacterial names has made microbiology increasingly difficult to follow, especially because textbooks have not yet adopted these revisions. Restoring widely recognized names, or retaining them as valid synonyms, would improve continuity and should be considered before updating bacterial names in public databases.

Fabian Bastiaanssen

Without these kinds of policies databases become useless to search by name alone

Clament Chin

For the future of bacteriology and microbiology.

Jeffrey Jones

Precise accepted nomenclature is critical for precisely referring to the causal agent by th correct name.

Costantino Vetriani

Exactly for the reasons articulated in the petition

Nick Jakubovics

Changing bacterial names causes significant problems and confusion until the new names become widely adopted. In several cases, names have subsequently changed again, causing further confusion. It would be better to take a more cautious approach to renaming bacterial taxa, as proposed in this petition.

Chip Kam Weng

Nomenclature and taxonomy are of utmost importance in scientific communication

Tsutomu Sekizaki

I always check the update taxonomy of bacteria. This greatly helps me to prepare the lecture of veterinary bacteriology in the University.

Luciano Augusto Palomino Kobayashi

Bacterial species determination is important since I work in bacterial genomics

HARI POLENAKOVIK

tp make it less confusing and more clinically relevant

miriam cordovana

Continuous taxonomy changes are creating serious issues in the clinical microbiology routine practice

Rachel Derscheid

The over-splitting and rapid adoption of proposed new names is confusing and often not fully "validated"; as an example, errors in Gupta et al's work have been identified.

Kalyani Maitra

To maintain uniformity in the bacterial taxon identification.

Neža Čadež

As a yeast taxonomist, I struggle with genus name changes that are made without consensus within the yeast research community. Therefore, I fully support the conservation of genus names and a consensus-based approach to any future bacterial genus name changes.

José Santos

As an Actinomycetota expert, I urge caution before modifying taxonomic names. These bacteria depend on stable nomenclature for vital scientific work, which can be disrupted. Moreover, name modification can obscure literature searches and fracture genomic datasets.

Katalin Kiss

we cannot change labels and product sheets once a product is made and distributed. These name changes create a risk for end users!