Nomenclature made easy
Many clinicians are understandably troubled by the frequent and sometimes repeated name changes of medical and veterinary fungi. But we have some good news. We installed a database with all 817 currently recommended names of fungi treated in the Atlas of Clinical Fungi, with their proven synonyms. The database is open access at www.atlasclinicalfungi.org, in the menu bar under ‘Nomenclature’. Just type a part of the name you are looking for in the search box. For example: is the name Pseudallescheria boydii still valid? Typing ‘boy’ in the box is already sufficient to find the recommended name: Scedosporium boydii, member of the S. apiospermum complex, supplemented with a large series of synonyms. When you are logged in to the Atlas, a link to the corresponding page is given, leading relevant diagnostic and clinical information: descriptions, clinical literature, type strains, and collected antifungal data. You can save your output selection in pdf format and print with the respective grey buttons.
At the right, you find a Comment box which is mostly empty. In a number of cases, however, the optimal name of the fungus is subject of dispute. A committee is being installed under auspices of the International Society of Human and Animal Mycology (ISHAM) and European Confederation of Medical Mycology (ECMM), to carefully consider the validity, scientific contents and practical use of every name. Members of the committee are taxonomists, nomenclaturists and clinical users. We aim to state the reasons for every recommendation, and eventually to publish this information, for transparency as well as education. For the entire, printable list of currently recommended names, scroll down to the blue box ‘Names …’. Below this box, some recent papers are provided, explaining the difficulties in indicating points of reference for important clinical fungi in the older literature.
In the Atlas of Clinical Fungi, several thousands of obsolete names and rare or unproven clinical cases are listed in a chapter ‘Index of doubtful names and unconfirmed clinical cases’. These names will be added to the database in a later stage. Our aim is to include all names of fungi that have been mentioned in the medical and veterinary literature in the database, hopefully leading to harmonization of nomenclature on a global scale. If we have missed anything, please let us know.