Type material in the NCBI Taxonomy Database.

Type material is the taxonomic device that ties formal names to the physical specimens that serve as exemplars for the species. For the prokaryotes these are strains submitted to the culture collections; for the eukaryotes they are specimens submitted to museums or herbaria. The NCBI Taxonomy Database (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/taxonomy) now includes annotation of type material that we use to flag sequences from type in GenBank and in Genomes. This has important implications for many NCBI resources, some of which are outlined below. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Nucleic Acids Research 2014. This work is written by (a) US Government employee(s) and is in the public domain in the US.