talk.ictvonline.orgInternational Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)

User Site Search User Home Information Taxonomy Files Discussions Study Groups Meetings ICTV Report Login/Join Menu Cancel International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses ICTV The ICTV Report Virus Taxonomy: The ICTV Report on Virus Classification and Taxon Nomenclature Master Species List Master Species List 2019; MSL #35 Orthography How to write a virus name Proposal Templates 2019 templates for submitting taxonomy proposals. Newsletters Updates on ICTV Activities Previous Feature 0 Feature 1 Feature 2 Feature 3 Feature 4 Next News New Taxonomy Release (2019): Master Species List #35 Updates approved during EC 51, Berlin, Germany, July 2019; Email ratification March 2020 View in the Taxonomy Browser ICTV Elections This fall, the ICTV will elect members of the Executive Committee. The positions available are those of President, Vice-President, Data Secretary, Proposals Secretary, and eleven Elected Members. The process is described in section 4.3 of the ICTV Statutes . If you wish to recommend someone for nomination, please send an email with the necessary documentation (see section 4.3.1) to nominations@ictv.global by 3 August 2020. Submit Your Taxonomy Proposal for 2020 New taxonomy proposals for 2020 can now be submitted. Templates for submitting proposals are available from https://ictv.global/proposal_templates/ . These 2020 templates MUST be used for all submissions. Please download all four files and read the Help file for detailed information on the submission process. The deadline for proposal submission to Subcommittee Chairs is July 31, 2020 . Naming the 2019 Coronavirus The virus causing the current outbreak of coronavirus disease has been named "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" (SARS-CoV-2). The manuscript describing the name also reports the work of the ICTV Coronaviridae Study Group (ICTV-CSG) that determined the virus belongs to the existing species, Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus. The is concerned with the designation and naming of virus taxa (i.e. species, genus, family, etc.) rather than the designation of virus common names or disease names. For an outbreak of a new viral disease, there are three names to be decided: the disease, the virus and the species. The World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for the first, expert virologists for the second, the ICTV for the third. WHO guidelines for naming of new human diseases can be found at "WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases" and "WHO Best Practices for the Naming of New Human Infectious Diseases" The following article may also be of interest: "Naming diseases: First do no harm" As experts on coronaviruses, the ICTV Coronaviridae Study Group has studied the classification (taxonomy) of the new virus. And given that they are experts on this family of viruses, they have also contributed their expertise to the naming of the virus. The virus name is "severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2" (SARS-CoV-2). And the species to which the virus SARS-CoV-2 belongs is Severe acute respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus. The disease name (which in many cases is different from the virus name) has been designated as COVID-19 by the WHO. The '19' in COVID-19 stands for the year, 2019, that the virus was first seen. The number '19' has nothing whatsoever to do with virus strains, genotypes, or anything else related to the virus' genetics. The virus name was announced by the World Health Organization on February 11, 2020. See the February 11 World Health Organization Situation Report . This clearly states that "WHO has named the disease COVID-19, short for 'coronavirus disease 2019'.” #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives On June 10, 2020 The ICTV demonstrated its support for #ShutDownAcademia, #ShutDownSTEM, and #Strike4BlackLives and showed its solidarity with Black Lives Matter by taking down our web site and redirecting everyone's attention to resources that provide information about systemic racism in Education, Science, and Society, to help each one of us educate ourselves and help to end the injustice. Please visit these sites for more information: #ShutDownAcademia; #ShutDownSTEM AAAS CEO Statement on #ShutDownSTEM and Black Lives Matter ASM Calls for Equality and Unity 500 Women Scientists Take Action Virus taxonomy finds its roots For some time, the classification of viruses by virus taxonomists has been focused on the grouping of relatively closely related viruses, often in the context of a paradigm that emphasizes the rapid evolution of viruses that cause disease in man, crops and animals. However, more recently, shotgun metagenomic sequencing has revealed the presence of a vast variety of viruses in environmental samples and apparently healthy organisms from all divisions of life. As a result of these advances, the has come to recognize that virus taxonomy can now be usefully extended to include the basal evolutionary relationships among distantly related viruses. Consequently, the ICTV has changed its Code to allow a fifteen-rank classification hierarchy that closely aligns with the Linnaean taxonomic system. This new structure can accommodate the entire spectrum of genetic divergence in the virosphere. We also predict that this new rank hierarchy will stimulate further research on virus origins and evolution and help to align virus taxonomy with the taxonomies of cellular organisms. This change has been recently reported in Nature Microbiology article (Nature Microbiology 5, 668–674 (2020) ICTV Taxonomy Release #35: 2019 The new 2019 ICTV taxonomy is now available online at https://ictv.global/taxonomy , and the new Master Species List #35 is available for download as an Excel Spreadsheet . This new release contains taxonomic changes approved by the ICTV membership in March, 2020. This release contains 4 realms, 9 kingdoms, 16 phyla, 2 subphyla, 36 classes, 55 orders, 8 suborders, 168 families, 103 subfamilies, 1421 genera, 68 subgenera, and 6590 species. A paper describing this release is being prepared for publication in the Virology Division News section of Archives of Virology. Past News For previous news announcements, please see https://talk.ictvonline.org/information/w/news Help! For questions or help, send an email to info@ictvonline.org Useful Resources Navigating Menus Information : Members, FAQs, Code and Statutes, History, News, Newsletters, VDN articles. Taxonomy : Current and historical ICTV taxonomic databases Files : Taxonomy Proposals, Master Species Lists, Proposal templates, and other ICTV-related files. Discussions : Discussions about the ICTV and virus taxonomy. Study Groups : Information on virus families provided by ICTV Study Groups. Meetings : Reports from ICTV-sponsored meetings addressing current problems in virus taxonomy. ICTV Reports : The ICTV Report on Virus Classification and Taxon Nomenclature ICTV Taxonomy Release #35: 2019 The new 2019 ICTV taxonomy is now available online at https://ictv.global/taxonomy . The new Master Species List #35 is available for download as an Excel Spreadsheet . This new release contains taxonomic changes approved by the ICTV membership in March, 2020. A paper describing this release is being prepared for publication in the Virology Division News section of Archives of Virology. Official taxonomy proposals documenting all of the taxonomic changes approved by the ICTV since the publication of the ICTV 8th Report can be found at https://ictv.global/Official_ICTV_Proposals.htm . The Virus Metadata Resource The Virus Metadata Resource (VMR) is a downloadable spreadsheet that provides information on exemplar viruses for each species. This information includes GenBank and RefSeq accession numbers for exemplar viruses and isolate and common names for viruses belonging to a species. The most recent VMR release adds information on the known categories of hosts infected by the virus or the source environment from which the virus ...