A substantial fraction of bacteria are unknown and undescribed, but as genomes exist for these unknown taxa, it is possible to describe them using genome-inferred information. However, the description of novel taxa currently lacks standardized formats and there is limited quality assurance during this process.
TAXA will fill this gap. The idea behind it is to use the published bioinformatic tool Protologger to provide standardized functional and taxonomic readouts of novel taxa using genome sequences, which will provide the building blocks for the community to describe them. This information will be provided to the community via a custom Wiki, allowing members of the community to contribute by converting the building blocks we provide into fully formed taxonomic descriptions. This tackles the problem of ambiguous naming practices in the process of validly describing novel species. Via the Wiki, researchers will be able to identify interesting and relevant bacteria to their research question at a glance.
Graphical abstract “Use Case TAXA” by Thomas Hitch and Thomas Clavel with visual adaptation by Charlie Pauvert is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
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Below, you will find the output provided by the Use Case. If you are interested in the development stages of the project, these are indicated by the following tenses and suffixes.
The output for the research community is already established (-ed for past tense), is currently being (-ing for present progressive) in progress, or will be soon set-up (present tense) for future endeavors.
microbiomes
taxonomy
novel bacterial species
nomenclature
protologues
bioinformatic tool
crowd-based