In each paper, the first encounter with the name of an organism should be followed by reference to the scientific name in parentheses.  Scientific names are made up of the genus and species names of an organism.  Genus should be capitalized and species should be lowercase and the whole name should be italicized (Genus species).  If the genus has been indicated previously, you can abbreviate (G. species).

Tiger                                      Panthera tigris

California box thorn               Lycium californicum

Purple throated carib             Eulampis jugularis

Roundworm                           Caenorhabditis elegans

Sea urchin                             Lytechinus pictus

 

Example

In Arabidopsis, Fe-regulated (Fer)-like iron-deficiency induced transcription factor (FIT), a basic helix–loop–helix (bHLH) transcription factor orthologous to the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) FER protein [19], is required to regulate iron-deficiency responses. (Jeong and Guerinot 2009)