Taxacom: building such a bridge (between DNA sequence and name) - was Minimalist revision of Mesochorus

Michael A. Ivie mivie at montana.edu
Thu Aug 31 14:35:35 CDT 2023


Throwing another spanner in the cogs: Nagoya!  The Sharkey paper was all 
Costa Rica, and they had full permits to use DNA from those specimens in 
a legal way.  While the intent of Nagoya was about economic benefits, 
the wording and application that I have so far had on a 
country-by-country basis is that ANY extraction, amplification, 
sequencing and publication requires special explicit permission in 
addition to a collecting and export permit for museum specimens.  What 
about a specimen that was collected legally, but the export permit did 
not include the right to extract and publish DNA?  Or, a specimen that 
was perhaps not even legally collected?  At this time, the legality of 
the specimen is not included in the Code, and doing so would be a 
nightmare, but requiring a sequence would place people in the possible 
situation of becoming a criminal.

Mike

On 8/31/2023 11:51 AM, Richard Pyle via Taxacom wrote:
> **External Sender**
>
> Thanks, Derek.
>
> This is the conundrum:  What happens when a DNA sequence, taken from a non-type specimen, is somehow formally/officially attached to the name, and then someone later declares that the two different specimens (the name-bearing type, and the specimen from which the DNA was extracted) are members of different species?
>
> An analogy in the Code is when there are Syntypes, and someone decides that the syntype series includes representatives of more than one species.  In such cases, a lectotype is selected from among the original syntype series, and the others become non-name-bearing paralectotypes.
>
> I imagine in such a situation with an "official" link between a non-type DNA sequence and a name where someone declares that they represent different taxa, the name remains linked to the original type specimen. In such cases, I would imagine a process for replacing the "official" DNA sequence with a "neo" DNA sequence.
>
> Bear in mind, this is a very tenuous proposal (to establish an official "genetic type" thing in the Code), and I seriously doubt it could be crafted with sufficient support for inclusion in Code 5, but it's not impossible (maybe Code-6?)  But I think that, given the direction things are going, there may indeed come a time when the broader taxonomic community will want some sort of formal link between a name and a DNA sequence.  Maybe not something as anemic as a barcode, but perhaps in a not-too-distant future where whole-genome sequences are commonplace, there could be real value in a provision of this sort.
>
> Aloha,
> Rich
>
> Richard L. Pyle, PhD
> Senior Curator of Ichthyology | Director of XCoRE
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-- 
__________________________________________________

Michael A. Ivie, Ph.D., F.R.E.S.

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