Currently, only approximately 150,000 of the estimated 6 million fungal species have been described. Describing all fungal species through culturing alone is estimated to take us 2,000 years. In a recent study
Fungal taxonomy and sequence-based nomenclature
led by Robert Lücking and Conrad L. Schoch, a sequence-based approach for the nomenclature of taxa known only from sequences was discussed. This approach aims to facilitate consistent reporting and communication in the literature and public sequence repositories. You can find an introduction about the study in this blog post. The poster image in the blog post showing the molecular fungal “universe” was derived from figure 3 in the paper. The image was created using our tool fMLC (Windows version), published in the paper fMLC: fast multi-level clustering and visualization of large molecular datasets.