Online sequence databases serve as a tremendously useful platform for researchers to share published data. However, submission systems lack control for errors such as misidentification, which once entered in the database can be propagated and mislead downstream analyses. Here we present an illustrating case of misidentification of Candida albicans from a clinical sample as Naumovozyma dairenensis based on whole-genome shotgun data. Part of our current work is the identification of species-specific genomic regions of human pathogenic yeasts. We have identified one such region, which is species-specific to C. albicans. However, during our work, when performing a BLASTn search against the Whole-genome shotgun (WGS) contigs database one of the obtained hits was a region of the Naumovozyma dairenensis (763_NDAI) assembly. As this species is phylogenetically distantly related to C. albicans the BLASTn hit seemed suspicious.

Misidentification of genome assemblies in public databases: the case of Naumovozyma dairenensis and proposal of a protocol to correct misidentifications