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When Mark Pallen and his colleagues began describing the chicken gut microbiome several years ago, they soon identified DNA sequences from undocumented species. In 2019, the team conducted its most comprehensive survey yet and found hundreds of seemingly novel microbes, some belonging to entirely new genera. “It became clear that much of what we were looking at then had never been named before, never been characterized,” says Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the Quadram Institute in the UK as well as the University of East Anglia and the University of Surrey.
Often, researchers publishing on microbial discoveries will assign alphanumeric designations such as “s__JCVI-SCAAA005 sp000224765” to new bacterial and archaeal species. But trained as a medical microbiologist, Pallen says he values the traditional binomial nomenclature instituted by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century that identifies an organism by its genus and species names. Giving ...
