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Taxonomy is the classification and description of living organisms. It includes the naming and defining of species, and the collation of data about their biology and biogeography.
Fossil seeds (60 to 20 million years old) from Colombia, Panama and Perú show previously unrecognized patterns of diversity and local extinctions of grapes in the New World. These also support a tentative origin of Vitis in the New World.
The International Committee on Systematics of Prokaryotes (ICSP) has recently altered long-standing phylum names and given no guidance for taxonomy of uncultured or imperfectly cultured archaea and bacteria, disrupting progress towards a universal system of microbial taxonomy. Inclusion of new members into ICSP may help it to keep up to date.
By sieving through the plant genomic literature for the last 20 years, a study uncovered a disconnection between the research locales and plants’ native ranges. Colonialism, both past and present, might be behind this disparity.