Herbaria collections containing plants with disease symptoms are highly valuable, and they are often the only way to investigate outbreaks and epidemics from the past as the number of viable isolates in culture collections is often limited. Species belonging to the Colletotrichum acutatum complex infect a range of important crops. As members of the C. acutatum complex are easily confused with o...

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...

Let the bar-coding begin.The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has given a $669,000 grant to a consortium of herbaria, museums, and research institutes to jump-start the Barcode Life Initiative, which aims to create an online catalog of the world’s flora and fauna. Each “bar code” will be a short DNA sequence taken from a mitochondrial gene. The sequences define individual species and will help resear...

National herbaria with significant historical plant collections are critical to tracking floristic changes and patterns, which include the introduction and spread of non-native plant species. To explore the importance of herbarium specimen data in understanding floristic changes in Zimbabwe, the plant collections housed by the National Herbarium (SRGH) in Harare, Zimbabwe were utilized with his...

We present data from a study of mercury concentrations in air and plant specimens from the MAF Herbarium in Madrid (Spain). Hg (gas) emissions from old plant collections treated with mercuric chloride (HgCl(2)) in herbaria may pose a health risk for staff working in installations of this type. This is an issue not yet properly addressed. Plants that underwent insecticide treatment with HgCl(2) ...