Edition 11 - May, 2002

Evolving from Culture Collections to Biological Resources Centres

In 1998, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) decided to examine support for biological resources centres (BRCs) as a key component of the scientific and technological infrastructure of the life sciences and biotechnology. To do this, the OECD set up a task force on BRCs. After two years of work, this task force issued its report: “Biological Resources Centres: Underpinning the Future of Life Sciences and Biotechnology”1.

This report concludes that “Biological resources centres are an essential part of the infrastructure underpinning life sciences and biotechnology. They consist of service providers and repositories of the living cells, genomes of organisms, and information relating to heredity and the functions of biological systems. BRCs contain collections of culturable organisms (e.g. micro-organisms, plant, animal and human cells), replicable parts of these (e.g. genomes, plasmids, viruses, cDNAs), viable but not culturable organisms, cells and tissues, as well as databases containing molecular, physiological and structural information relevant to these collections and related bioinformatics.”

RCs are needed for the preservation and provision of biological resources, for the conservation of biodiversity (in the framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), Rio de Janeiro 1992),
and for R&D on these biological resources. They must also serve as repositories for the protection of intellectual property and resources for public information and policy formulation. Nevertheless, they face major challenges for their future, for one must ensure financial support to achieve long-term stability and quality and expertise.
The restrictions affecting access to the biological material and related information must also be overcome.

In order to ensure financial stability over the long term, the OECD recommends that governments provide a baseline of long-term core funding to BRCs, encourage the development of high standards of quality, and promote research, development, technology transfer, and commercial exploitation. Moreover, the BRCs should co-ordinate their activities to best serve their essential functions, develop new products and services, seek other sources of funding such as the industry and foundations, and promote direct participation of industry in their activities.

By being accessible to all legitimate users worldwide and serving as international gateways to facilitate access to biological resources, the BRCs will have to overrun restrictions affecting access to some of these resources in order to protect health and safety, the rights of individuals and patients, industrial investments and secrecy, and intellectual property rights, to meet import/ export regulations, and to use material transfer agreements.

The OECD report calls for action by OECD countries and beyond and recommends that governments, the scientific community, and the private sector work together to achieve five main goals: the establishment of national BRCs, to develop an accreditation system for BRCs based on international criteria, the
creation of international linkages among BRCs, the co-ordination of standards, rules and regulations taking BRCs into account and, finally, the development of a global BRC network.

For culture collections such as the BCCM collections, the main objectives of becoming a BRC will be to upgrade the level of expertise and combine high-quality management of biological resources with powerful data management. The benefits will be becoming a reference BRC, participating in strategic planning in scientific research on biodiversity, and being able to join related international initiatives .

BCCM has been in the process of becoming a BRC for years by, among other things, its participation in several European initiatives such as the Microbial Information Network Europe Project (MINE), the Common Access to Biological Resources and Information Project (CABRI), and the newly created European Network of Biological Resources Centres (EBRCN).

Related websites

European Network of Biological Resources Centres (EBRCN): www.ebrcn.org

Common Access to Biological Resources and Information: www.cabri.org

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