Touche (Fleming 1929), working downstairs from Fleming’s
laboratory (Henk et al. 2011; Houbraken et al. 2011). This
identification was likely to be based upon comparison to
fungal collections available to La Touche and a monograph of
Biourge (1923). The epithet rubrum is derived from the Latin of
‘red’, and named accordingly due to the “reddish colour” as
described by Fleming (1929). However, in 1930 another
mycologist Charles Thom received Fleming’s isolate for use in
his latest monograph (Thom 1930) and reassigned the isolate
from P. rubrum to Penicillium notatum (Thom 1945); a member of
Thom’s “P. chrysogenumseries” (Thom 1910). Thom mistakenly
criticised Fleming regarding the assignment to P. rubrum and
commented, “not being a mycologist, he undertook to identify
the mould from the literature and selected the name” (Thom
1945). Thom was apparently unaware that in fact La Touche
had aided in the identification of Fleming’s Penicillium. Nevertheless,
the name P. notatum was carried forward until 1977
when, following the morphological study of isolate type
strains, it was declared a synonym of P. chrysogenum, along
with other species in Thom’s series (Samson et al. 1977).
Similarly, the older epithet Penicillium griseoroseum was synonymised
with P. chrysogenum (Houbraken et al. 2011), however
due to industrial importance of the name ‘chrysogenum’ it was
suggested that ‘griseoroseum’ should be rejected (Frisvad et al.
1990). Since then, the name P. chrysogenum has been
declared ‘nomen conservandum’, preserving the name and
rejecting all predating epithets (Henk et al. 2011; Houbraken
et al. 2011)