Preslia 90: 151–169, 2018 151 Seeking the true Oscillatoria: a quest for a reliable phylogenetic and taxonomic reference point Hledání fylogenetického a taxonomického referenčního bodu pro rod Oscillatoria RadkaMühlsteinová1,2,TomášHauer1,2,PaulDe Ley3 &NicolePietrasiak4 1Department of Botany, Faculty of Science, University of South Bohemia, Branišovská 31, České Budějovice, Czech Republic, CZ-370 05, e-mail:
[email protected]; 2The Czech Academy of Sciences, Institute of Botany, Centre for Phycology, Dukelská 135, CZ-379 82, Třeboň, Czech Republic, e-mail:
[email protected]; 3Department of Nematology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California 92521, USA, e-mail:
[email protected]; 4Department of Plant and Environmental Science, New Mexico State University, Skeen Hall, Box 30003 MSC 3Q, Las Cruces, New Mexico 88003, USA, e-mail:
[email protected] Mühlsteinová R., Hauer T., De Ley P. & Pietrasiak N. (2018): Seeking the true Oscillatoria: a quest for a reliable phylogenetic and taxonomic reference point. – Preslia 90: 151–169. Reliable taxonomy of any group of organisms cannot be performed without phylogenetic refer- ence points. In the historical “morphological era”, a designated type specimen was considered fully sufficient but nowadays this principle can prove to be problematic and challenging espe- cially when studying microscopic organisms. However, within the last decades there has been tre- mendous advancement in microscopy imaging and molecular biology offering additional data to systematic studies in ways that are revolutionizing cyanobacterial taxonomy. Unfortunately, most of the existing herbarium specimens or even iconotypes of old established taxa often cannot be subjects of modern analytic methods. Such is the case for the widely known cyanobacterial genus Oscillatoria which was introduced by Vaucher in 1803.