International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)

The ICTV Report

Online (10th) Report on Virus Taxonomy: The Classification and Nomenclature of Viruses
Master Species List

Current Master Species List 2018a
Orthography

How to write a virus name

Current News

The Virus Metadata Resource

The Virus Metadata Resource (VMR) is a downloadable spreadsheet that provides information on exemplar viruses for each species. This information includes GenBank and RefSeq accession numbers for exemplar viruses and isolate and common names for viruses belonging to a species. A new VMR based on MSL33 was posted on December 20, 2018.

Remembering

Said "Gabe" Ghabrial

We are sad to report the passing of Dr. Said A. Ghabrial, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Plant Pathology, University of Kentucky, and Chair of the ICTV Subcommittee on Fungal Viruses from 1987-1993 and 2011-2014. An overview of his life and career has been published in the Annual Review of Virology.

Dr. Christopher Schardl, Chair of Plant Pathology at the University of Kentucky, provided the following remembrance: “Gabe, was an immensely important and deeply loved member of our faculty and our department community since joining us in 1972. He had been Tom Pirone’s star student at Louisiana State University, and seven years later, Gabe joined our department. He assembled a group that worked on plant viruses as well as fungal viruses, thus bridging several other programs in the department. Dr. Ghabrial was made a Fellow of the American Phytopathological Society in 2002. Gabe always prioritized his mentoring and educational missions, and trained many excellent scientists. He served as an outstanding mentor to me when I started here, and likewise to other new faculty in the department. He and his wife Karlin were always warm and welcoming.”

Keeping up with virus taxonomy

The blog Microbe Post, from the Microbiology Society is now highlighting ICTV Profiles published in the Journal of General Virology.

Why virus taxonomy is important

The article, "Why virus taxonomy is important", published in Microbiology Today by Stuart Siddell, ICTV Vice President, discusses the importance of virus taxonomy and its role in helping to define the evolutionary relationships between viruses and understand the consequences of virus diversity.

ICTV in Nucleic Acids Research

An article appearing in the Nucleic Acids Research 2018 Database issue, "Virus taxonomy: the database of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)" describes the ICTV database and the web-based tools available to query that database: Lefkowitz EJ, Dempsey DM, Hendrickson RC, Orton RJ, Siddell SG, Smith DB. Nucleic Acids Res. 2017 Oct 13. doi: 10.1093/nar/gkx932. PubMed PMID: 29040670.

Past News

For previous news announcements, please see https://talk.ictvonline.org/information/w/news

Fifty Years of Virus Taxonomy

Navigating Menus

Information: Members, FAQs, Code and Statutes, History, News, Newsletters, VDN articles.
Taxonomy: Current and historical ICTV taxonomic databases
Files: Taxonomy Proposals, Master Species Lists, Proposal templates, and other ICTV-related files.
Discussions: Discussions about the ICTV and virus taxonomy.
Study Groups: Information on virus families provided by ICTV Study Groups.
Meetings: Reports from ICTV-sponsored meetings addressing current problems in virus taxonomy.
ICTV Reports: Online versions of the current 10th and previous 9th Reports on Virus Taxonomy.

Items of Interest

	New! ICTV 2018 Taxonomy
The new 2018 ICTV taxonomy is now available online at http://ictvonline.org/virusTaxonomy.asp.

The new ICTV Master Species List for 2018 is available for download as an Excel Spreadsheet.
This new release contains taxonomic changes approved during an expedited ratification process in the Fall of 2018. Ratification of all other proposals approved by the Executive Committee this past July will take place as usual, next spring.
The release is described in: Additional changes to taxonomy ratified in a special vote by the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (October 2018). Arch Virol. 2019 Jan 20. doi: 10.1007/s00705-018-04136-2. PubMed PMID: 30663020.
This release expands the available taxonomic ranks to include Class, Phylum, Kingdom, and Realm, as well as sub-ranks for all ranks.
Official taxonomy proposals representing all of the taxonomic changes approved by the ICTV since the publication of the ICTV 8th Report can be found here: http://talk.ictvonline.org/media/22/default.aspx/.

ICTV Report Available Online

The ICTV Report on Virus Taxonomy (also known as the Online (10th) Report) is available in a freely accessible format from this web site at http://ictv.global/report. Over a three-year cycle, ICTV Study Groups will update the information in the chapters of the 9th Report as well as produce chapters for newly created virus taxa.

Journal of General Virology:
ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profiles

Summaries of the Online Report chapters are published in the Journal of General Virology, ICTV Virus Taxonomy Profiles section. These summaries are linked to the full Online Report chapters on the ICTV website and are indexed in PubMed.

How to write a virus name

A document detailing the ICTV's recommendation for how to write a virus name is available here.

Submitting Taxonomic Proposals

ICTV welcomes taxonomic proposals from any interested individual. To submit a proposal, download and complete the relevant parts of the taxonomic template (available at http://talk.ictvonline.org/files/folders/templates/default.aspx) and e-mail it to the appropriate subcommittee chair (Animal DNA Viruses and Retroviruses, Animal dsRNA and ssRNA- Viruses, Animal ssRNA+ Viruses, Bacterial and Archaeal Viruses, Fungal and Protist Viruses, or Plant viruses). Names and e-mail addresses can be found at http://www.ictvonline.org/executiveCommittee.asp.

Help!

For questions or help, send an email to info@ictvonline.org

Recent Activity

Support

ICTV gratefully acknowledges financial support from the American Society for Virology, Microbiology Society, the Virology Division of IUMS, and Wellcome. ICTV also very gratefully acknowledges the support it receives from all its Executive Committee members, Study Group members and National Representatives who volunteer a huge amount of their time and financial support to ensure that ICTV continues to function for the good of virology. We would also like to thank Donald Dempsey and Curtis Hendrickson from the University of Alabama at Birmingham for their work on the development of the web site and taxonomy database.

International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV)