Preserving the Biologically Coherent Generic Concept of <i>Phytophthora</i>, “Plant Destroyer”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Phytophthora is a long-established, well-known, and globally important genus of plant pathogens. Phylogenetic evidence has shown that the biologically distinct, obligate biotrophic downy mildews evolved from Phytophthora at least twice. Because, cladistically, this renders Phytophthora “paraphyletic,” it has been proposed that Phytophthora evolutionary clades be split into multiple genera ( Crous et al. 2021 ; Runge et al. 2011 ; Thines 2023 , 2024 ). In this letter, we review arguments for the retention of the generic name Phytophthora with a broad circumscription made by Brasier et al. (2022) and by many delegates at an open workshop organized by The American Phytopathological Society. We present our well-considered responses to the genus splitting proposals, both in general terms and in terms of the specific proposals for new genera, alongside new information regarding the biological properties and mode of origin of the Phytophthora clades. We consider that the proposals are mostly non-rigorous and not supported by the scientific evidence. Further, given (i) the apparent lack of any distinguishing biological characteristics (synapomorphies) between the Phytophthora clades; (ii) the fundamental monophyly of Phytophthora in the original Haeckelian sense ( Haeckel 1877 ); (iii) the fact that paraphyly is not a justification for taxonomic splitting; and (iv) the considerable likely damage to effective scientific communication and disease management from an unnecessary breakup of the genus, we report that workshop delegates voted unanimously in favor of preserving the current generic concept and for seeking endorsement of this view by a working group of the International Commission on the Taxonomy of Fungi. [Formula: see text] Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license .
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".