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International audience; The European Consortium of Microbial Resource Centres (EMbaRC, www.embarc.eu) is a research infrastructure project gathering together the major microbial Biological Resource Centres (BRCs) in Europe. These cultures collections have a long and respected tradition in training people that are involved in microbial taxonomy, preservation and management. Advanced and bespoke courses on related topics add high value to the European educational community and create a knowledge-based training network. Under the framework of EMbaRC, the training programmes offered by the consortium were surveyed and schemes were proposed to establish an educational community to create a knowledge-based training network and implement lifelong educational and continuing professional development (CPD) schemes for those working within microbial resources centres (MiRC). In parallel, with CPD was designed a European Masters Course on MiRC to address the formal education path for strengthening competences in (1) Microbial Preservation Technologies, (2) MiRC: Organisation and Management, (3) QC Standards and International Regulations, (4) Microbial Biosafety and Biosecurity, and (5) IT Technologies and Databases Management. Finally, to support these actions, materials for e-learning activities were developed such as videos related to microbial preservation techniques, the Gram-staining technique and, preparing microscopic slides of fungi. All activities developed under this EMbaRC task will leverage the MIRRI and other EU ESFRI-BMS and EMTRAIN projects.

The European Consortium of Microbial Resource Centres (EMbaRC) is a ResearchInfrastructure project gathering 8 major microbial Biological Resource Centres(BRCs) in Europe. It aims at improving, coordinating and validating microbialresource delivery to European and international researchers from public andprivate sectors. A major action in EMbaRC is to set up a Training and OutreachProgramme, providing European research teams with a physical access not only tomicrobial BRCs holding bacteria, yeasts, filamentous fungi and plasmids, butalso to associated installations and expertise. Through EU-funded stays for 1to 6 weeks, European scientists performed experiments in various fields ofmicrobiology. Researchers used advanced techniques for identification andtyping of micro-organisms: molecular biology (16S rDNA sequencing, DNA-DNAhybridization, AFLP, PFGE, RAPD, FISH) and chemotaxonomy (MALDI-TOF, FTIR,FAME, enzyme activity high throughput screening). Phenotypic characterisationof isolates (bacteriocin or enzyme production) was also carried out, in somecases to develop polyphasic approaches for identification. Access tomicroscopic facilities (confocal and epifluorescence microscopes) was alsoprovided, notably to biofilm-related projects. In most of the cases, accessprovision was also an opportunity to disseminate good practices in collectionand database management, including preservation techniques and appropriate useof public sequence databases, fostering the operation of European microbialcollections according to appropriate standards and methods. This action alsoimpacts students thanks to the access given to academic users.