Original title: The UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi: handling dark taxa and parallel taxonomic classifications
UNITE is an online resource for identifying fungi from a DNA barcode called ITSA stretch of DNA used as the standard barcode for identifying fungi.. It gathers public fungal ITS sequences and groups similar ones into species hypotheses, which are groups treated as possible species. Each group gets a permanent digital identifier, even if its formal name is unknown. The database also links its records to a major biodiversity classification and can support many classification systems at once.
Imagine sorting a box of buttons by shape before you know what each one was made for. Some piles are clear, but others do not match any named type, and different people may sort the same buttons in different ways. In this paper, the piles are groups of similar fungal DNA sequences, their permanent labels let people refer to them consistently, and parallel sorting systems let researchers keep different classifications side by side.
People identifying fungi from DNA need dependable reference sequences, including for groups that have not yet been formally named. UNITE organizes those references and lets researchers use different classification systems side by side, making results easier to compare across studies.
The abstract describes UNITE's contents, curation, and recent features, but it does not report how accurately the resource identifies fungi or compare its performance with other databases. It also does not establish how complete its sequence coverage is or how well its classifications work for every fungal group.
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The UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi: handling dark taxa and parallel taxonomic classifications — R. Henrik Nilsson, Karl-Henrik Larsson, Andy F. S. Taylor et al. — Nucleic Acids Research — doi:10.1093/nar/gky1022
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.