A rose is rose is a rose is a... roseota?

by Roberto

Give me a chance to quote Gertrude Stein and I'll do so glad­ly. This time the op­por­tu­nity was handed to me on a sil­ver plat­ter. On Oc­to­ber 2021, al­most out of the blue, the In­ter­national Com­mit­tee on Sys­tem­at­ics of Prokary­otes (ICSP) pub­lished a pa­per with the "names and for­mal de­scriptions of 42 phyla to ef­fect valid pub­li­ca­tion of their names..." Therein the ICSP was 'or­der­ing' sci­en­tists all over the world to fol­low their rules to validly pub­lish the rank of bacter­ial and ar­chaeal phyla, ac­cord­ing to the In­ter­na­tional Code of Nomen­cla­ture of Prokary­otes, or else... Good in­tentions. But you all know which road is paved with good in­ten­tions. Christoph tells me that the pub­li­ca­tion from the ICSP caused quite a stir on Twit­ter for a short time. (Is any­thing long-lived on Twit­ter?). The rea­son for the out­cry?

A Rose. Photo by Me­chas Zam­brano

In pass­ing, al­most buried among the many new phy­lum names, were the edicts to change two beloved names (and then some).

Fir­mi­cutes hence­forth Bacil­lota!
Pro­teobac­te­ria hence­forth Pseudomon­adota!
(Quite frankly, to me, these changes are... Id­iota!)

I can only imag­ine the "stul­ti­fy­ing" dis­cus­sions that led to this "Pro­crustean bed" de­ci­sion on ta­­­xonomy. (If you are cu­ri­ous about why I placed quotes on the two fore­go­ing ad­jec­tives, please read the first para­graph of Woese and Gold­en­son (2009).) I am de­lighted to say that, since the ini­tial pub­li­ca­tion of the name changes, I have read two ex­cel­lent opin­ion pa­pers highly crit­i­cal of the ICSP and its de­ci­sion (here and here). I hope Bacil­lota and Pseu­do­mo­na­do­ta don't stick.

Long live Fir­mi­cutes!
Long live Pro­teobac­te­ria!


N.B. I would cer­tainly be okay re­fer­ring to them as Fir­mi­cu­teota and Pro­teobac­te­ri­ota, as pro­posed by Panda et al. (2022).
 

 

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