TY - JOUR T1 - Taxonomic annotation of public fungal ITS sequences from the built environment - A report from an April 10-11, 2017 workshop (Aberdeen, UK) JF - MycoKeys Y1 - 2018 A1 - RH Nilsson A1 - A FS Taylor A1 - RI Adams A1 - C Baschien A1 - j Bengtsson-Palme A1 - P Cangren A1 - C Coleine A1 - H-M Daniel A1 - SI Glassman A1 - Y Hirooka A1 - Irinyi, Laszlo A1 - R Irsenaite A1 - PM Martin-Sanchez A1 - Meyer, Wieland A1 - S-Y Oh A1 - JP Sampaio A1 - KA Seifert A1 - F Sklenar A1 - Dirk Stubbe A1 - S-O Suh A1 - R Summerbell A1 - S Svantesson A1 - M Unterseher A1 - CM Visagie A1 - M Weiss A1 - JHC Woudenberg A1 - C Wurzbacher A1 - S Van Den Wyngaert A1 - N Yilmaz A1 - U Koljalg A1 - K Abarenkov KW - built environment KW - Fungi KW - Indoor mycobiome KW - metadata KW - molecular identification KW - open data KW - sequence annotation KW - systematics KW - Taxonomy AB -

Recent DNA-based studies have shown that the built environment is surprisingly rich in fungi. These indoor fungi – whether transient visitors or more persistent residents – may hold clues to the rising levels of human allergies and other medical and building-related health problems observed globally. The taxonomic identity of these fungi is crucial in such pursuits. Molecular identification of the built mycobiome is no trivial undertaking, however, given the large number of unidentified, misidentified, and technically compromised fungal sequences in public sequence databases. In addition, the sequence metadata required to make informed taxonomic decisions – such as country and host/substrate of collection – are often lacking even from reference and ex-type sequences. Here we report on a taxonomic annotation workshop (April 10–11, 2017) organized at the James Hutton Institute/University of Aberdeen (UK) to facilitate reproducible studies of the built mycobiome. The 32 participants went through public fungal ITS barcode sequences related to the built mycobiome for taxonomic and nomenclatural correctness, technical quality, and metadata availability. A total of 19,508 changes – including 4,783 name changes, 14,121 metadata annotations, and the removal of 99 technically compromised sequences – were implemented in the UNITE database for molecular identification of fungi (https://unite.ut.ee/) and shared with a range of other databases and downstream resources. Among the genera that saw the largest number of changes were Penicillium, Talaromyces, Cladosporium, Acremonium, and Alternaria, all of them of significant importance in both culture-based and culture-independent surveys of the built environment.

VL - 28 M3 - 10.3897/mycokeys.28.20887 ER -