What should you call your favourite virus?

The International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses (ICTV) meet regularly to ensure the taxonomy of viruses is kept logical and up-to-date in the face of an ever-increasing number of new viruses and genome sequences; discussed in here in Nature. This sometimes results in the renaming of a recently discovered virus as more becomes known about it and its origins (Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus has now become Huaiyangshan banyangvirus). Changes to the species name of viruses that are well known and highly referred to in both academia and industry have also occurred, such as Cytomegalovirus becoming human betaherpesvirus 5. Use of the common name is still approved by ICTV, but the recommendation is to include accurate family, genus and species names to avoid confusion.

We’ve listed some of the major changes below, and will reference the new species names throughout our literature in due course.  In the meantime, it will be interesting to see if any of the new names become commonly used, and which ones gain little or no day to day use.