Why are species names not italicised in metadata records?

Although it is convention to italicise species names in scientific outputs, you may notice that our metadata records do not do so. 

For example: Antibiotic resistance and resistant genes in Escherichia coli from human, poultry and environmental samples in urban and rural Bangladesh (2017-18)

Our metadata needs to comply with metadata standards such as UK GEMINI . Unfortunately this means it must be provided as plain text and so cannot support italics or any other formatting such as bold or coloured text.