From culture collections to biological resource centres

Abstract

As defined by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), biological resource centres (BRCs) are an essential part of the infrastructure underpinning life sciences and biotechnology. They consist of service providers and repositories of living cells, genomes of organisms, and information relating to heredity and the functions of biological systems. BRCs contain collections of culturable organisms (e.g. genomes, plasmids, viruses, cDNAs), information on viable but not yet cultured organisms, cells and tissues, as well as databases containing molecular, physiological and structural information relevant to these collections and related bioinformatics.