GenBank & Taxonomical Nomenclature/identification

[Detlef Leipe]

On Thu, 27 Jul 2000, Doug Yanega wrote:
[text deleted]
> And if a sequence registered for, say, Drosophila, is obviously that of
> another organism entirely, like a honeybee? Can such a record be removed or
> changed? It *may* have been just such an error in the case I'm referring

Doug,

if we are notified of an inaccurate name, we contact the submitter and
try to find out whether this really is a misidentification and take it
from there.  If we can't do that (because the submitter is
unresponsive, the email is not working anymore etc.) and there is clear
and irrefutable evidence that the species name is wrong, we will
consider changing the name unilaterally. But clearly, our preference
is to receive a statement from the submitter first.

I would also like to point out that we perform sequence similarity
searches on each sequence at the time it is submitted. For a gene that
is reasonably well represented in the database, we would probably pick
up on an obvious misidentification and clarify the issue with the
submitter immediately. On the other hand, if the submitter
misidentifies a species of a bee for a closely related one, our system
would not catch the error.

Regards,

  Detlef Leipe
  GenBank taxonomy group

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