Modern science revolves around databases, be they the massive (e.g. NCBI) or the bespoke (e.g. EzBioCloud). There are enormous databases covering the sequence world and the protein world but what of the organisms from which they are derived? With this is mind, we have argued (Sutcliffe et al. 2012; Rosselló-Móra 2012; Rosselló-Móra and Amann 2015; Sutcliffe 2015; Rossello-Mora and Whitman 2019) that microbial systematics needs to become a database driven science. After all, if it has taken more than a century to characterise  10 m prokaryotic species (< 0.2%), then a flexible repository will be needed if we are to complete a timely systematic census of the microbial world. An ideal database would integrate information on the characteristics of a taxon with nomenclatural information and links out to other databases, particularly for sequence data, and back to the original data source (primary publication). Entries would range from the minimal information needed to delineate a novel taxon through to maximal descriptions of well characterised taxa.

Peer reviewed