IUBio

[Annelida] Vouchers again

Geoff Read via annelida%40net.bio.net (by g.read from niwa.co.nz)
Wed Jun 25 23:33:33 EST 2008


>>> On 26/06/2008 at 3:49 p.m., Elena Kupriyanova <lena.kupriyanova from gmail.com> wrote

GBR
>> "Revisions or updates to GenBank entries can be made by the submitters"  
> Right, only by the submitters, but they don't do it. They just hold tight, 
> take the heat, and pretend (in the GenBank record) they didn't stuff up. 
> Strike three and out for usefulness of vouchers in practice?

Lena
> Again, as I said above - with multiple diverse sequences attributable to 
> one species such a stuff up will be really difficult to hide

GBR
>> Ps - a case of switched identities between the sequences of 2 vastly 
> different worm taxa has been mentioned to me privately. One just happens to 
> be a taxon I'm interested in. Nice to know - but it should be GenBank which 
> told me.

Lena
> What does BLAST tell in this case? And why to not to correct this 
> mistake now, once it is known?

BLAST shows that it is definitely a crazy id :-) -  as my informant suggested.  I think this one is so obvious it will not trouble anyone.

Lena, thanks for your perspective, as a very experienced user.  Of course I really do think vouchers are most important. 

I'm not sure whether the 'no dedicated field' in Genbank claim in the Fred Pleijel et al paper under discussion really meant that there was no high level field (ie, would be a separate table in the database) with subfields to it. At the moment the voucher info seems to appear parked into a general comments area in the display. If so, that's unsatisfactory. The paper mentions that Barcoding of Life Database handles vouchers info better.

Geoff







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