World Data Centre for Microorganism 2023 Annual Meeting
December 7, 2023
November 2, 2023 - November 3, 2023
Location
Shenzhen, China
Meeting Report
USCCN Steering Committee member, Kyria Boundy-Mills attended the World Data Centre for Microorganisms (WDCM) 2023 Annual Meeting in Shenzhen, China.
Seventy scientists from 23 countries attended the meeting, the first in-person WDCM meeting since the start of the COVID pandemic. In addition to the formal talks, there were many very productive side conversations among collection curators. Meeting program and abstracts of the talks are available online here.
Kyria Boundy-Mills presented two talks:
- “Three essential collection elements: Microbes, data and expertise”, about the Phaff Yeast Culture Collection at UC Davis, USA
- “The United States Culture Collection Network (USCCN) – An Overview”
Some useful information of interest to microbe culture collections include:
- A separate Code of Nomenclature called SeqCode is being set up to name bacterial species that have not yet been isolated or cultured in the lab, based on DNA sequences. Collections whose mission includes preserving type strains should be aware of this development.
- StrainInfo is being revived by DSMZ. This is a centralized database of microbe strains held by many collections, with information about the provenance of strains, and tracing how they have been transferred among collections. DSMZ has obtained the code from the previous owners, and are updating it.
- Several collections mentioned specific ISO certification categories. Collections managers may want to learn more about these standards.
- Microbe collections are encouraged to register in WDCM’s ccInfo database. Also, collections can add their collection catalog to the Global Catalog of Microorganisms, an aggregator that has combined the catalogs of over 140 microbe collections around the world.
The meeting ended with a tour of the BGI DNA sequencing facility.