Is the nomenclature reform completed today?

               Sergei Rosen and Lucy Nazarian
Bactaxon Microbiological Center, International Informatization Academy
                Eilat, Israel

               
Lecture read in Tel-Aviv University; Annual meeting of the Israel society for microbiology, February 9, 1998

    The forthcoming nomenclatural reform was announced in 1973, and after the publication of Approved Lists in 1980, one could have supposed that it would now have been completed.
 
    The regulating of any system concerns both the description of the components as well as their names. As usual in natural sciences, the use of quantitative indexes is extremely desirable in this case.

    Before the reform, quantitative data were introduced in basicguides: in the Code of Nomenclature was a requirement for registering deviated strains; in Bergey’s Manual was the degree of reliability of each test.

    The quantitative approach has given a possibility for bacteriologists of any country not only for ascertaining the correctness of identification tables, but also for receiving data about the most widespread – eurybiotic – species for the intensification of biotechnologies and for the organization of a service for control over the safety of microbiocenosis in nature.

    These possibilities were not realized. Tables in Bergey’s Manual without appropriate references were temporary as before, on account of the absence of a comprehensive summary of literary data with a quantitative description of each species, as was done for bacterial names in the Index Bergeyana. Our material on lactic acid bacteria of Russia/USSR was not marked and the applied method did not find followers.

    The obsolete conception about the cosmopolitism of bacteria and the loss of the most active person for reform – Robert Buchanan )1883-1973) – were responsive for this situation.

    The delay in the treatment of experimental material during a whole quarter of a century is all the more annoying in that, as it turned out, the registration of deviated strains and the calculation of the comparative spreading of species are analogical phenomena.

    The regulation of a Bacterial System has not been completed not only relating to properties, but also relating to names. In the treatment of material of different countries, it may turn out that there will be a necessity for the regulation of a Natural System of Bacterial Names.