Prof. Cobus Visagie received the prestigious Johanna Westerdijk Award for outstanding contribution to the culture collection of the Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute in the Netherlands. The Award is presenteded on special occasions to an individual who has made an outstanding contribution to the culture collection of the Institute, marking a distinguished career in mycology. Nominees are evaluated on the quality of their contributions to the collection, and on the basis of associated mycological research in general.

Cobus was attending the Institute’s Spring Symposium from 7-8 April in Utrecht, the Netherlands. This year’s theme was ‘DNA sequence as type’ where he presented a talk “From morphology to DNA: Using the modern taxonomy of Eurotiales to explore the potential of DNA sequences as type”. Topics discussed at this year’s symposium included naming of environmental sequences (dark taxa); using DNA sequence data as holotype; naming species based on DNA characters only; and a species is more than its DNA sequence only.