How Type Material improves the quality of Genome Data

Authors

• B Robbertse
• CL Schoch

Abstract

Type material ties formal biological names to physical specimens. When a strain or specimen voucher can be clearly associated with a name and genetic data it serves as a crucial reference point for genetic comparisons. Recently curators at NCBI have started to collect and annotate type material data, when available, for all formally described species. This has been applied to a range of records, from single nucleotides to full genomes. The most immediate impact has been in improving the accurate identification of genome data from bacterial strains. By combining type material information with alignment free k-mer trees, wrongly identified bacterial genomes are currently detected with high confidence and corrected in public records. The increase in fungal genomes with type information will make an expansion of this approach feasible in the near future. Here we present details on this and other approaches to improve and access the accuracy of species names for fungal genomes.

Scientific Focus Area: Research Support Services

This page was last updated on Friday, March 26, 2021