MBRHT@dlvh.daresbury.ac.uk (06/19/91)
I am wondering what provisions GenBank and EMBL have made for dealing with changes in classifications of organisms represented in the sequence databases. I realize this is not of concern to people working on _the_ fruitfly, or _the_ mouse, or _the_ yeast, but to those of us working on molecular evolution/systematics changes in classifications, sometimes as a result of molecular work, are a fact of life that has to be dealt with when retrieving information about organisms. There are taxonomic databases in which new classifications are readily incorporated. These keep track of name changes over time so that when searching the database with a name, appropriate entries are found according to the definition of the taxon at any given time. Does GenBank do this? If not, I see the lack of such a facility as a real handicap as more sequence data accumulates from "nonstandard" organisms. Richard Thomas Molecular Biology Unit The Natural History Museum London