MycoBank gearing up for new horizons

Abstract

MycoBank, a registration system for fungi established in 2004 to capture all taxonomic novelties, acts as a coordination hub between repositories such as Index Fungorum and Fungal Names. Since January 2013, registration of fungal names is a mandatory requirement for valid publication under the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi and plants (ICN). This review explains the database innovations that have been implemented over the past few years, and discusses new features such as advanced queries, registration of typification events (MBT numbers for lecto, epi- and neotypes), the multi-lingual database interface, the nomenclature discussion forum, annotation system, and web services with links to third parties. MycoBank has also introduced novel identifcation services, linking DNAsequence data to numerous related databases to enable intelligent search queries. Although MycoBank flls an important void for taxon registration, challenges for the future remain to improve links between taxonomic names and DNA data, and to also introduce a formal system for naming fungi known from DNA sequence data only. To further improve the quality of MycoBank data, remote access will now allow registered mycologists to act as MycoBank curators, using Citrix software.