correctness of identification in sequence studies

[James B. Whitfield]

Taxacomers,
        It seems to me we had a thread going on this topic in the
past year or so, or at least on the topic of whether such
identification errors in GenBank and other databases could be
corrected.
Members of the GenBank team responded, clarifying that of course the
names given to taxa CAN be corrected and/or updated, and SHOULD be.
However, as you can imagine, such changes are only made after
consulting the original depositor if possible, or otherwise verifying
that this is a reasonable idea.   It would certainly not be a good
idea to give everyone unregulated access to changing names in a
permanent database such as GenBank.
        In my experience, the rate of identification errors in
Genbank is not substantially different from that one would find by
consulting a large museum collection, or the literature as a whole.
What HAS been a problem, to my mind, is that often molecular
systematists (me, I must admit, included, even though I do
morphology-based work also) have deposited sequences from
representatives of a genus (or even a family) as part of a
higher-level phylogeny, without identifying the specimens to species.
Thus, there are records for "Tenthredinidae sp.", etc.  GenBank now
requires these to be associated with the name of the designator of
this label.  This means that, unless the original authors  have a
good voucher system for specimen remnants, etc., these sequences may
be more or less unidentifiable after the fact and thus useless for
lower-level studies.
        Any of these problems are fixable over time if proper voucher
specimens are deposited and the taxonomic information is well dealt
with.  In my mind, this is an underdeveloped area where both
descriptive taxonomists and molecular systematists can really
collaborate to enhance the support for museums (which can really use
the help).
                                                        Cheers, Jim
--
James B. Whitfield
Associate Professor
Entomology, 321 AGRI
University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
tel.  501-575-2482
FAX 501-575-2452
email jwhitfie at uark.edu