In their paper on ‘Uncultivated microbes in need of their own taxonomy’, Konstantinidis et al. (2017) proposed standards to draw the roadmap for a new genome-based taxonomy aimed at including the great majority of microbial species that are yet uncultivated. According to their proposal, the taxonomy of the uncultivated bacteria and archaea as based on genomic and metagenomic data, would, at least initially, be parallel but highly convergent to the one in existence for isolates. The call to include yet-to-be-cultivated organisms in the taxonomic system of the prokaryotes is not novel; similar proposals have been made for least two decades already. And the rapid development of sequencing technology and of bioinformatic tools to extract relevant information from the sequences obtained has already given us a wealth of information about the uncultivated majority. And there can be no doubt that the field will greatly expand in the years to come.

In the last two sections of the Perspectives paper the authors exposed their ideas about nomenclature aspects that must be taken into account when integrating the uncultivated prokaryotic world within the ‘old’ system that is based on isolated strains and especially type strains, representing the ~15 000 species of prokaryotes with names with standing in the nomenclature as regulated by the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (the Prokaryotic Code) (Parker et al., 2016), an official publication the International Committee on Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICSP). Konstantinidis et al. (2017) called for the establishment of a committee of experts that should be formed to govern and supervise the new classification system, in a similar way to ICSP: ‘We believe it is high time for microbial ecologists to establish their own official committee that will make recommendations on how to classify uncultured taxa with harmonized high standards, supervise and manage an ‘official’ classification and the rules of the nomenclature of uncultured taxa’. This is an intriguing proposal, as also for the cultivated minority such an ‘official’ classification system does not exist. The ICSP does not support any ‘official’ classification of the prokaryotes, and the Prokaryotic Code deals with nomenclature aspects only. Principle 1.4 states: ‘Nothing in this Code may be construed to restrict the freedom of taxonomic thought or action’.

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