A Workshop organised by The Biotechnology Information Strategic Forum, with support from DGXII of the Commission of the European Communities, and held at CAB International, Wallingford, Oxon, UK, October 1996
Securing biotechnology resources, the needs of the resource centres -- Alan Doyle
With heightened awareness of the need to conserve nature and biological biodiversity as a result of the Convention of Biodiversity in 1992 the role of culture collections as important resource centres has increased.
The major functions of a culture collection can be listed as:
* To provide a comprehensive range of pure authenticated cultures that are of past, present or potential interest.
* In practice this means the collection of contaminant free and well-characterised reference micro-organisms.
* This provides a stock of cell types which investigators would otherwise find difficult to obtain.
* This ensures that cultures will not be lost and that effort and resources will not be wasted in establishing stocks.
* All these activities bring together the expertise to provide a service and this can lead to improved methods in characterisation, quality control and storage.
Culture collections naturally have a responsibility to ensure that the customer receives what he has ordered. Thus rigorous testing to ensure the purity, viability and authenticity is required. The validation of preservation methods is necessary in order to reduce the potential to changes in the characteristics of a culture. Overall, a high level of quality control is required in all aspects of collection activities from initial receipt of material through expansion and preservation procedures to dispatch to external scientists.
Culture Collections are increasingly operating within a Quality management system such as BS EN ISO 9001. Essentially these regulations ensure that all procedures followed are written and therefore fully documented. This enables traceability in all activities. The level of staff training is critical and should be documented stating a good level of competency. Furthermore all equipment log books, calibration and servicing records and also all laboratory records and worksheets should be retained and regularly audited.
Thus the culture collections hold specialist information which customers can acquire by means of a catalogue (hard copy or electronic). Increasingly databases are being developed and are now becoming available on networks such as the internet. Consequently there is a wealth of information, most in the public domain, but this is not always clearly identified, validated and easy to access. Given the above noted needs for validation and quality control, this aspect has to be addressed.
A number of initiatives have been undertaken over the years to address these needs; unfortunately, few have worked. Thus the Microbial Resource Databank (MIRDAB), a publisher based initiative started in 1983, and the UK Microbial Culture Information Service (MiCIS), the first national data project in this field, both closed after a few years of development. Attempts to establish one international Hybridoma Databank failed due to financing differences between the USA, Japan and Europe with the result that the Europeans now have a separate database - the Immunoclone Database. Even so the EC is unable to fund such initiatives for long periods of time and so their funding ceased in 1992 since when the database has not been updated on a regular basis.
MINE (Microbial Information Network Europe) which was also originally funded by the European Economic Community (EEC) and has the traditional taxonomic orientation of the Service Collections, does not include full strain data but only a minimum data set. The Cell Line Data Base (CLDB) is another example of a project designed to make the information on human and animal cell lines available to the Italian research community but, like MINE, it does not solve the full needs of the community, especially from the point of view of resource deliverability.
The Microbial Strain Data Network (MSDN) was started in 1985 in order to construct a world-wide network of holders of strain data serving as nodes, known as network information nodes, in an information network. The sheer magnitude of the number of repositories of microbial strain data and the numbers of strains held within those repositories has generated serious data acquisition and communication problems. The MSDN is designed to operate as a locator service for repositories of desired combinations of attributes by an indirect method. The system works by scanning for a feature of interest. When a node is found that has the required feature then direct contact can be made. In addition to this Central Directory other databases and services are available from the MSDN including gateways to HDB and the World Data Centre for Collection of Micro-organisms (WDCM).
Sadly, none of these initiatives have actually satisfied the biotechnology community's need for standard, high quality, information and cultures. As already indicated there are numerous culture collections operating within Europe and each collection currently produces its own catalogue.
From the user's perspective these catalogues are often difficult to locate, they may not define whether the deposit of interest is a replicate or original. In addition the catalogues are rarely linked together so that a search can cover a wide range of resources.
In view of this and other difficulties, such as geography and language, the European Community has recently funded the CABRI (Common Access to Biotechnological Resources and Information) project. The project has been designed to increase contact between European collections, thereby developing an integrated network and so helping to overcome the apparent disseminated appearance. Currently there are six resource centre partners, holding a variety of 21 collections with 140,000 deposits. This represents 50% of the genetic resources within Europe but CABRI is designed so that in the future it can be expanded on the acceptable "institute without walls" approach, accepting new resource centres as the service evolves into a sustainable part of the bioinformatics infrastructure.
Central to the hoped for success is that all aspects of the offered product must be of the highest possible quality, thus making it different from WDCM. The selection of criteria, methodologies and the monitoring of this quality will be done by the participating resource centres and will be implemented by them as a minimum standard, thereby giving a uniform level of quality. CABRI will therefore offer European collections an opportunity to remain central to world-wide biotechnology research and development and ensure that customers receive the quality and efficiency they require.