Toward the global cooperation: WFCC Global Catalogue of Microorganisms

Juncai Ma
WFCC-MIRCEN World Data Center of Microorganisms (WDCM)
Information Center, Institute of Microbiology,
Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Culture collections are the reservoir of invaluable microbial resources and information since the first service collection in Prague, the Král collection. They are now as diverse taxon-wide, application-wide and region-wide as microbes are. In the meantime, WDCM has provided a comprehensive view on culture collections and their holdings to the relevant communities.
WDCM has been managed by a new host, Information Center, Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences from 2011. The 3rd generation of WDCM in Beijing will expand the personalized services to culture collections and their customers, e.g.

• Customization and mail push of microbial information
• Online collaborative working platform
• Bioinformatics analysis platform
• Website and online catalogue for culture collection centers in need
• Video conferencing system.

After the relocation of WDCM, WDCM has worked out the new WFCC webpage and online reference strain catalog. The new WFCC website allows users to submit their own news and pictures to enhance user feedback. WDCM reference strains online catalog helps users to find local sources of the reference strains by citing all collections and providing contact details and the collection’s unique reference. Furthermore, WDCM is developing an Analyzer of Bio-Resources (ABC) as one of the very important services provided to WFCC members, which provides searching and statistics tools for Culture collections or strains.
In 2011, WDCM started to build a new electronic global catalogue of micro-organisms kept by the WFCC affiliated collections in this year. This huge endeavor will be structured in two phases. First a pilot phase with 20 to 30 collections volunteering to contribute to this test that will help build a robust and reliable system to disseminate the information related to the WFCC members holdings. Then the full scale project intended to open the culture collections community to all microbiologists, giving the collections a high profile and maximum visibility.