Back to Latin and tradition: a proposal for an official nomenclature of virus species
- PDF / 54,168 Bytes
- 6 Pages / 595 x 786 pts Page_size
- 8 Downloads / 175 Views
1465
Back to Latin and tradition: a proposal for an official nomenclature of virus species H. Agut Laboratoire de Virologie du CERVI, Groupe Hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière, Paris, France
Background The taxonomy of viruses (i.e the classification of viruses into well defined clusters) has dramatically improved in the recent years, in particular due to the action of International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV). The current scheme of classification includes four hierarchical levels: species, genus, family (with the possibility of an intermediate taxon, the subfamily) and order. So far, the ICTV has approved 3 orders, 56 families, 9 subfamilies, 223 genera and 1550 virus species [10]. This taxonomy is developing but the taxa already approved by ICTV remain largely stable (only minor changes have occurred among these taxa between the 6th and 7th ICTV Reports) and are well accepted by most, if not all, virologists. In parallel, an official virus nomenclature has been established to provide distinctive scientific names to these well accepted taxa. Orders, families, subfamilies, and genera have been given official names ending by -virales, -viridae, -virinae and -virus, respectively. These names are written in italics and with a capital initial letter. The only remaining question is that of official names for virus species. This issue is not simple, has already been the subject of numerous attempts and is currently the subject of a debate, often polemical, among virologists [1–5, 7–9]. All virus species have vernacular (common) names derived from the name of their host, virus-induced disease in this host, geographical site of their discovery and/or other particular characteristics. These names are considered common words: they are written in roman characters without capitalization (except for proper names that keep a capital initial when included within common species names) and differ according to each national language. For instance, “measles virus” in English and “virus de la rougeole” in French designate the same virus, which is responsible for measles in humans. In the revised version of the International Code of Virus Classification and Nomenclature published in 1998 [4], novel rules indicated that species names (i.e. vernacular names since no official name had been defined so far) that were previously exempted from italicization and capitalization, should be printed in italics and have the first letter of the first word capitalized (Rule 3.40), provided they were “accepted names” as approved by ICTV (Rule 3.8). Concomitantly, the examples given in the Rule 3.40 of the code were vernacular English names and, as a matter of fact, conferred the status of official species names to these
1466
Virology Division News
English names. This decision appeared questionable for several reasons: (i) it had not been widely debated among the community of virologists; (ii) it might be a real obstacle in terms of pronunciation and orthography for those whose first language is not English; (iii) it made impossible the dis
Data Loading...
