From the World Directory of Collections of Cultures of Microorganisms towards Mash-up of Biodiversity and Sequence Databases

Prof. Dr. Hideaki Sugawara, WFCC-MIRCEN World Data Centre for Micro organisms (WDCM), National Institute of Genetics

 

WDCM as the data center of World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) has maintained the world directory of microbial culture collections since 1972. It is available on-line by the database of CCINFO at the WDCM site (http://www.wdcm.org/). In the meantime, WDCM has assigned a unique identifier to culture collections, namely, the WDCM number. In theory, one can assign a globally unique identifier (GUID) cultures by the combination of the WDCM number and the strain number such as WDCM123+STRAIN4567. It is to be noted that codes for the type of collections such as algae, bacteria, fungi and etc are required because culture collections often maintain multiple types of collections and use the overlapping strain numbers.

In addition to the World Directory, WDCM tests linkage between the unified taxonomy of the International Nucleotide Sequence Databases (INSD: DDBJ, EMBL and GenBank) and databases of the data providers of Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) based on DiGIR and a SOAP server developed by DDBJ. The SOAP server is for searching the taxonomy database that is maintained by the INSD. It is feasible to mash up INSD and databases on culture collections by GUIDs. GBIF is intensively working on the definition and implementation of GUIDs that covers any types of biological specimen and strains.