Proposal of names for 328 higher rank taxa defined in the Genome Taxonomy Database under two prokaryotic codes

The Genome Taxonomy Database (GTDB) is a taxonomic framework that defines prokaryotic taxa as monophyletic groups in concatenated protein reference trees according to systematic criteria. This has resulted in a substantial number of changes to existing classifications (https://gtdb.ecogenomic.org). In the case of union of taxa, names were applied based on the priority of publication. The division of taxa or change in rank led to the formation of new Latin names above the rank of genus that were only made publicly available via the GTDB website without associated published taxonomic proposals. This sometimes led to confusion in the literature and databases. A number of the provisional GTDB names were later published in other studies, while many still lack authorships. To reduce further confusion, here we propose names and descriptions for 328 GTDB-defined prokaryotic taxa, 223 of which are suitable for validation under the International Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes (ICNP) and 48 under the Code of Nomenclature of Prokaryotes Described from Sequence Data (SeqCode). For the latter we designated 21 genomes as type material. An additional 57 taxa that do not currently satisfy the validation criteria of either code are proposed as Candidatus .