DNA Barcode initiative

As director of the CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre in Utrecht, The Netherlands, Pedro Crous is one of the world's leading authorities on fungal taxonomy. His interest in the identification and classification of fungi came by a somewhat circuitous route, however. "I come from South Africa and originally trained in forestry," he says. "However, I pretty soon became intrigued to answer the question about why all the trees were dying - and that took me into plant pathology. I then became interested in fungi that caused the diseases, and that took me into taxonomy, working to identify these organisms."

The CBS Fungal Biodiversity Centre houses the largest collection of living fungi in the world, with some 60,000 living cultures. The centre, which is more than 100 years old, is an institute of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, which has a mission to make scientific information freely available. "So the idea of a DNA barcode database that is universally accessible online fits in well with this philosophy," Crous says.