Diversification and focusing: strategies of microbial culture collections.

Implementation of quality measures, compliance with the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), and adoption of latest bioinformatics tools are among the main steps to be taken by microbial culture collections in order to provide resources for the emerging area of the knowledge-based bioeconomy. These measures have to be introduced side by side with the deposition of increasingly phylogenetically and physiologically diverse microbiological organisms. However, the necessary expansion of human resources and infrastructure is moving slowly, if at all. Furthermore, considering that the vast majority of microbial isolates do not find their way into public collections, a strategy should be devised to encourage researchers to deposit a higher fraction of strains. It appears obvious that in order to make available an even broader range of diversity to users and researchers, collections will have to decide whether to diversify on a broad taxon spectrum of the hierarchic system, holding a small number of representatives per species, or to follow the route of focusing on in-depth holdings of selected groups of organisms, depending on existing taxonomic expertise. These decisions require a worldwide coordinated activity with the outcome to be made transparent to users in an emerging global network. Copyright 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.