The International Committee on Systematic of Prokaryotes announces an important new revision of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes.
24 May 2023
In this news story written by the International Committee on Systematic Prokaryotes learn about the new revision of the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes they recently announced.
Effective communication in microbiology depends on our ability to name the micro-organisms on which we work – which in turn depends mostly on the work of taxonomists. Whereas the practice of taxonomy can become the source of much debate and, indeed, controversy, the ways in which prokaryotes are named are more straightforward because nomenclature is governed by Principles and Rules. These are compiled in the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP), which is administered by the International Committee on Systematic of Prokaryotes (ICSP).
The ICNP itself is an evolving document. The first edition, published in 1948, was succeeded by revisions issued in 1958, 1966, 1976, 1990 and 2008. The latter was published as a special issue of the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology (IJSEM, the official journal of the ICSP) in 2019.
In the period from 2008 onwards, multiple proposals to modify the ICNP accumulated. Thus, it is a considerable achievement that the Editorial Board of the ICNP, and the ICSP itself, have recently collated and debated these many proposals, allowing the ICSP to vote on which to incorporate. This has allowed the compilation of a new edition of the ICNP, the “2022 revision”, which has just been published in IJSEM: doi.org/10.1099/ijsem.0.005585. This will be an important resource for those seeking to name cultured prokaryotes and we encourage those doing so to consult this new edition.
Image: ICSP.