Fottea

Fottea 2020, 20(1):104-110 | DOI: 10.5507/fot.2019.020

Quo vadis, taxonomy of cyanobacteria (2019)

Jiří Komárek

Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, Branišovská 31, CZ 37005 České Budějovice, Czech Republic

Motto: "I consider the human endeavour to discover new processes and regularities in nature, completed by requirement and satisfaction in logical arrangement of discovered facts into the objective and regular order, as a main stimulus of the noble evolution of the human society." - Albert Einstein. The problem of identification and evaluation of new described cyanobacterial taxa, particularly of the genera established after molecular sequencing, is discussed. Numerous new taxonomic units were defined according to molecular analyses in the last 20 years, but their later identification by biological community (particularly by ecologists) is often hardly possible. The molecular sequencing and evaluation must be surely a basis of the modern and future taxonomic classification, but the application of polyphasic approach to the definition of single taxa and enabling the orientation and later recognition of all described taxonomic units is quite necessary and inevitable.

Keywords: cyanobacteria, taxonomy, morphology, traditional evaluation, molecular sequencing, polyphasic approach

Received: September 13, 2019; Accepted: November 25, 2019; Prepublished online: January 20, 2020; Published: April 1, 2020  Show citation