Fungal systematics: is a new age of enlightenment at hand?

Fungal taxonomists pursue a seemingly impossible quest: to discover and give names to all of the world's mushrooms, moulds and yeasts. Taxonomists have a reputation for being traditionalists, but as we outline here, the community has recently embraced the modernization of its nomenclatural rules by discarding the requirement for Latin descriptions, endorsing electronic publication and ending the dual system of nomenclature, which used different names for the sexual and asexual phases of pleomorphic species. The next, and more difficult, step will be to develop community standards for sequence-based classification.