An Overview of Biological Resource Center-Maintenance of Microbial Resources and Their Management

Culture collections have played important roles in the preservation and distribution of microbial cultures to end users and contributed significantly toward microbial taxonomy as acting depositories of type strains that are used to identify new relatives of these strains. Quality management requirement of maintaining cultures is increasingly becoming important with the progress of molecular biology and genomics accompanying databases in life sciences and biotechnology. At the same time, culture collections are expected to work for the infrastructure to ensure compliance with national and international laws and regulations for handling and transferring microbial resources. Microbiologists must pay particular attention to the national policies in their respective countries concerning the Convention on Biological Diversity for access into microbial resources. Biological resource centers (BRCs) are the advanced stage of culture collections and expected to provide infrastructural support for the activities of microbiologists in relation to social accountability as well as the scientific activities.