Trans-National Acess to BRCs with EMbaRC : A user -oriented Approach to Foster Research and Innovation

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.