Strains Book

Many strains or specimens are used in scientific publications where their properties are described and potentially repeated. Such strains basic data (like geographic origin, equivalent numbers in other collections, taxon name, and other data) are valuable information that are often unavailable.

Most strains present in scientific papers have never been deposited in officially recognized collections and are therefore under high risk of being lost or badly maintained. It is estimated that only one strain out of 10.000 described in scientific journals are safely deposited in official collections. And official culture collections couldn't keep up with 10.000 times more deposits, as current preservation technologies are still manual and labor intensive.

When depositing strains or specimen in international repositories, scientists have to repeat the deposited information at each place with an important risk of making mistakes and losing time.

StrainsBook aims to capture some basic data related to the strains or specimens used in scientific journals and repositories. It will request a few mandatory data points and provide a unique address and identifier to all strains or specimens. With such a system, each strain or specimen will get a unique identifier and labels will not be confused with the same labels used by other researchers.

MIRRI-ERIC has accepted to host, maintain and improve StrainsBook with the help of BioAware. This is a long-term endeavour felt to be important where data need to be safely managed and kept.