scholarly journals From culture collections to biological resource centres

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 4 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ipek Kurtböke
Keyword(s):  
Service Providers ◽  
Structural Information ◽  
Biological Systems ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Economic Cooperation ◽  
Living Cells ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Culture Collections ◽  
Biological Resource Centres

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.

scholarly journals Quality management and biological resource centres

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 31
Author(s):  
Vera Weihs
Keyword(s):  
Quality Management ◽  
Final Stage ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Culture Collections ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Service Culture ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
The Future ◽  
Traditional Service

The 2001 OECD report Biological resource centres: underpinning the future of life sciences and biotechnology resulted in the establishment of the Guidance for the operation of BRCs. This document still is in its final stage of discussions and has not yet been passed. Nevertheless, many traditional service culture collections already comply (or try to) with these guidelines in their daily work.

scholarly journals Biosecurity responsibilities of biological resource centres

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 19
Author(s):  
Ronald M Atlas
Keyword(s):  
Public Health ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Biological Materials ◽  
Health Protection ◽  
Microbial Culture ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Culture Collections ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
The World ◽  
Public Health Protection

Biological resource centres (BRCs), which house the world?s microbial culture collections, have emerging biosecurity responsibilities to prevent terrorists from acquiring dangerous pathogens that could be used to do harm. This presents a major challenge to the primary functions of BRCs, which are to supply biological materials for research, public health protection and economic development.

scholarly journals The World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) and biological resource centres

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 10
Author(s):  
David Smith
Keyword(s):  
Cell Lines ◽  
World Federation ◽  
Genetic Integrity ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Culture Collections ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
The World ◽  
Derivatives Of

The World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) is the largest independent global organisation representing professional individuals and culture collections which preserve and utilise biodiversity. Member collections target living microorganisms, cell lines, viruses and parts and derivatives of them. Key values are authenticity and genetic integrity of the material and validity of the information provided.

scholarly journals The OECD initiative: towards a Global Biological Resource Centre Network (GBRCN)

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 40
Author(s):  
Iain Gillespie
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Economic Cooperation ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
Industrialised Countries

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has played a central role in the development of the concept of biological resource centres (BRCs) since the outset. Why does an international governmental organisation that brings together 30 mostly highly industrialised countries and that is focused on globalisation and economic growth have an interest in such an area?

scholarly journals The three cornerstones for biological resource centres

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Virginie Storms ◽  
Philippe Desmeth ◽  
Jean Swings
Keyword(s):  
Future Development ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Great Effort ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
The Future

Biological resource centres (BRCs) are an essential part of the infrastructure underpinning life sciences and biotechnology. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) taskforce on BRCs (1999-2004), has put in a great effort of thought to define the new BRCs and forms the basis for the future development of the actual culture and reference collections. The effort, which has taken so many years and was, from the beginning, inspired by many WFCC members, has resulted in an important visionary document.

scholarly journals NBRC, a national biological resource centre of Japan

2006 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 33
Author(s):  
Ken-ichiro Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Information ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Biological Materials ◽  
Biological Resource ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
Catching Up ◽  
Microbial Cultures ◽  
The Government ◽  
Intellectual Properties

As defined in the OECD report issued in 2001, biological resource centres (BRCs) are an essential part of the infrastructure underpinning life sciences and biotechnology. A wide variety of biological materials such as microbial cultures, biomass, DNA, etc are supplied by BRCs. The databases available from BRCs are not only for the sales of materials, but also for those containing scientific information catching up with other advanced bioinformatics. In addition to these scientific contents, BRCs are expected to operate in the management of intellectual properties and promotion of the government?s policy on biosafety, quarantine, etc.

scholarly journals Quantitative linear dichroism imaging of molecular processes in living cells made simple by open software tools

2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexey Bondar ◽  
Olga Rybakova ◽  
Josef Melcr ◽  
Jan Dohnálek ◽  
Petro Khoroshyy ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Biological Systems ◽  
Linear Dichroism ◽  
Quantitative Information ◽  
Living Cells ◽  
Software Tools ◽  
Model Systems ◽  
Membrane Properties ◽  
Polarization Microscopy ◽  
Molecular Processes ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractFluorescence-detected linear dichroism microscopy allows observing various molecular processes in living cells, as well as obtaining quantitative information on orientation of fluorescent molecules associated with cellular features. Such information can provide insights into protein structure, aid in development of genetically encoded probes, and allow determinations of lipid membrane properties. However, quantitating and interpreting linear dichroism in biological systems has been laborious and unreliable. Here we present a set of open source ImageJ-based software tools that allow fast and easy linear dichroism visualization and quantitation, as well as extraction of quantitative information on molecular orientations, even in living systems. The tools were tested on model synthetic lipid vesicles and applied to a variety of biological systems, including observations of conformational changes during G-protein signaling in living cells, using fluorescent proteins. Our results show that our tools and model systems are applicable to a wide range of molecules and polarization-resolved microscopy techniques, and represent a significant step towards making polarization microscopy a mainstream tool of biological imaging.

scholarly journals USMI Galaxy Demonstrator (UGD): a collection of tools to integrate microorganisms information

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniele Pierpaolo Colobraro ◽  
Paolo Romano
Keyword(s):  
Service Providers ◽  
Basic Information ◽  
Unique Identifier ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Representational State Transfer ◽  
Biological Resource Centres ◽  
The Galaxy ◽  
Science Domain ◽  
On Line ◽  
Strain Number

Due to the fragmentation of microbial information and the several branch of human activities encompassed by microorganism applications, a comprehensive approach for merging information on microbes is needed. Although on line service providers collect several data on microorganisms and provide services for microbial Biological Resource Centres (mBRCs), such services are still limited both in contents and aims. The USMI Galaxy Demonstrator (UGD), an implementation of the Galaxy framework exploiting the XML-based Microbiological Common Language (MCL), is meant to support researchers to make an integrated access to enriched information from microbial catalogues, as well as to help mBRC curators in validating and enriching the contents of their catalogues. Researchers and mBRC curators may exploit the UGD to avoid manual, potentially long, searches on the web and to identify and select microorganisms of interest. UGD tools are written in Python, version 2.7. They allow to enrich the basic information provided by catalogues with related taxonomy, literature, sequence and chemical compound data retrieved from some of the main databases on the basis of the strain number, i.e. the unique identifier for a given culture, and the species names. The data is retrieved by querying database Web Services using either the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or the Representational State Transfer (REST) access protocols. The MCL format provides a versatile way to archive and exchange data among mBRCs. Galaxy is a well-known, open, web-based platform which offers many tools to retrieve, manage and analyze different kind of information arising from any life science domain. By exploiting Galaxy flexibility,UGD implements some tools and workflows that can be used to find and integrate several information on microorganisms. UGD tools integrate basic information which may support mBRC staff in the insertion of all fundamental strain information in a proper format allowing integration and interoperability with external databases. They also extend the output by adding information on source materials, including species and strain numbers, and retrieve associated microorganisms which use a compound or an enzyme in whatever metabolic pathway by returning the accession number, synonyms, links to external databases, taxon name, and strain number of the requested molecule.

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