Domains of Life: Viruses
Because of their unusual biological attributes, the taxonomy of viruses has long been idiosyncratic. In fact, the standard system of Linnaean nomenclature was only recently adopted (Mayo and Horzinek 1998). However, the intractability of morphological approaches led viral taxonomists to an early involvement in DNA-based approaches to both species description and routine identification (Ward 1993). These involvements have led Gibbs et al. (2004) to suggest that all future species descriptions for viruses should include a summary of short DNA sequences that allow the unambiguous separation of the new taxon from existing species. There are also ongoing efforts to build a web registry of the diagnostic sequence information needed to support routine identifications (Onodera and Melcher 2002).
References
- Gibbs, A. J., J. S. Armstrong and M. J. Gibbs. 2004. Combinations of gene sequence features describe organisms efficiently; examples from tobamoviruses. In Review.
- Mayo, M. A. and M. C. Horzinek. 1998. A revised version of the International Code of Virus Classification and Nomenclature. Arch Virol. 143:1645-1654.
- Onodera, K. and U. Melcher. 2002. VirOligo: a database of virus-specific oligonucleotides. Nucl. Acids Res. 30:203-204.
- Ward, C. W. 1993. Progress towards a higher taxonomy of viruses. Res. Virol. 144:419-453.