UniEuk: Time to Speak a Common Language in Protistology! |
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| Authors: | Cédric Berney Andreea Ciuprina Sara Bender Juliet Brodie Virginia Edgcomb Eunsoo Kim Jeena Rajan Laura Wegener Parfrey Sina Adl Stéphane Audic David Bass David A Caron Guy Cochrane Lucas Czech Micah Dunthorn Stefan Geisen Frank Oliver Glöckner Frédéric Mahé Christian Quast Jonathan Z Kaye Alastair G B Simpson Alexandros Stamatakis Javier del Campo Pelin Yilmaz Colomban de Vargas |
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| Affiliation: | 1. Sorbonne Universités UPMC Université Paris 06 & CNRS, UMR7144, Station Biologique de Roscoff, Roscoff, France;2. Department of Life Sciences and Chemistry, Jacobs University gGmbH, Bremen, Germany;3. Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Palo Alto, California, USA;4. Department of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom;5. Geology and Geophysics Department, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, USA;6. Division of Invertebrate Zoology & Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics, American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York, USA;7. European Nucleotide Archive, EMBL‐EBI, Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge, United Kingdom;8. Department of Botany and Zoology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada;9. Department of Soil Sciences, College of Agriculture and Bioresources, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada;10. Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science, Weymouth, United Kingdom;11. Department of Biological Sciences, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, USA;12. Scientific Computing Group, Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies, Heidelberg, Germany;13. Department of Ecology, University of Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany;14. Department of Terrestrial Ecology, Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO‐KNAW) & Laboratory of Nematology, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands;15. Microbial Genomics and Bioinformatics Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, Bremen, Germany;16. CIRAD, UMR LSTM, Montpellier, France;17. Department of Biology, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, Canada;18. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Institute for Theoretical Informatics, Karlsruhe, Germany |
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| Abstract: | Universal taxonomic frameworks have been critical tools to structure the fields of botany, zoology, mycology, and bacteriology as well as their large research communities. Animals, plants, and fungi have relatively solid, stable morpho‐taxonomies built over the last three centuries, while bacteria have been classified for the last three decades under a coherent molecular taxonomic framework. By contrast, no such common language exists for microbial eukaryotes, even though environmental ‘‐omics’ surveys suggest that protists make up most of the organismal and genetic complexity of our planet's ecosystems! With the current deluge of eukaryotic meta‐omics data, we urgently need to build up a universal eukaryotic taxonomy bridging the protist ‐omics age to the fragile, centuries‐old body of classical knowledge that has effectively linked protist taxa to morphological, physiological, and ecological information. UniEuk is an open, inclusive, community‐based and expert‐driven international initiative to build a flexible, adaptive universal taxonomic framework for eukaryotes. It unites three complementary modules, EukRef, EukBank, and EukMap, which use phylogenetic markers, environmental metabarcoding surveys, and expert knowledge to inform the taxonomic framework. The UniEuk taxonomy is directly implemented in the European Nucleotide Archive at EMBL‐EBI, ensuring its broad use and long‐term preservation as a reference taxonomy for eukaryotes. |
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| Keywords: | Community expertise diversity eukaryotes
EukBank
EukMap
EukRef
taxonomy |
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