Oral Presentation Australian Society for Microbiology Annual Scientific Meeting 2013

Implications of the new Melbourne Code for naming foodborne fungi (#174)

John I Pitt 1
  1. CSIRO, NORTH RYDE, NSW, Australia

The Melbourne Botanical Congress of July, 2011 made a number of changes to the way nomenclature of biological species other than animals will be regulated in the future. To start with, the “International Code for Botanical Nomenclature (ICBN)” will henceforth be the “International Code for Nomenclature of Algae, Fungi and Plants (ICN)”. To the surprise of most mycologists, including many of those who supported the change, the Melbourne Congress decreed that henceforth each fungus would have only one legitimate name – bringing to an abrupt end 40 years of dual nomenclature for fungi with a pleomorphic life cycle. Food mycologists have been among the strongest supporters of the system, as it provided a means of ready identification to genera such as Penicillium, Aspergillus and Fusarium, while using the differences in sexual states to emphasise spoilage by xerophiles, heat and chemical resistance, plant pathogenicity, etc. Other users of the taxonomies of ommon genera, including curators of art and artefacts, textile and leathergood manufacturers and shippers, and indoor air specialists, came to rely on the use of names of sexual species as an indicator of characteristics of importance to them. This must all now change, but in some genera the way forward is murky. In some common genera, such as Alternaria, the sexual state is rarely seen in culture, so use of the asexual name for all species will cause little difficulty. Phylogenetic differences between subgenera in Penicillium supported splitting of that genus, keeping it for the majority of species and synonymising the sexual genus Eupenicillium with it. At the same time, species in subgenus Biverticillium were synonymised with the sexual genus associated with many of them, Talaromyces. However, the way forward in Aspergillus, which has 11 sexual genera associated with it, and Fusarium, with six, is not at all clear. This paper will describe some of the problems surrounding the naming of common foodborne genera under the Melbourne Code.