UniEuk: Time to Speak a Common Language in Protistology! - PubMed (original) (raw)

Review

. 2017 May;64(3):407-411.

doi: 10.1111/jeu.12414. Epub 2017 Apr 21.

Andreea Ciuprina 2, Sara Bender 3, Juliet Brodie 4, Virginia Edgcomb 5, Eunsoo Kim 6, Jeena Rajan 7, Laura Wegener Parfrey 8, Sina Adl 9, Stéphane Audic 1, David Bass 4 10, David A Caron 11, Guy Cochrane 7, Lucas Czech 12, Micah Dunthorn 13, Stefan Geisen 14, Frank Oliver Glöckner 2 15, Frédéric Mahé 16, Christian Quast 15, Jonathan Z Kaye 3, Alastair G B Simpson 17, Alexandros Stamatakis 12 18, Javier Del Campo 8, Pelin Yilmaz 15, Colomban de Vargas 1

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Review

UniEuk: Time to Speak a Common Language in Protistology!

Cédric Berney et al. J Eukaryot Microbiol. 2017 May.

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.

Keywords: EukBank; EukMap; EukRef; Community expertise; diversity; eukaryotes; taxonomy.

© 2017 The Author(s) Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of International Society of Protistologists.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

The UniEuk workflow. Bottom‐up, community‐based information on eukaryotic biodiversity from (A) classical knowledge, (B) phylogenetic diversity, and (C) environmental ‘‐omics’ surveys, converge and synergize through the UniEuk modules to inform the navigable and editable, consensus‐based taxonomic framework (D). Dotted and colored frames indicate input and output information, respectively. Line drawings of eukaryotes adapted with permission from

https://genev.unige.ch/system/pawlowski/lab/tree.png

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