From CABRI to MIRRI: the evolution of an ITC infrastructure for microbial resources

Microbial resource centers (MRCs) have offered services to the scientific community for centuries.In the Internet era, many efforts have been undertaken to integrate their data and services (1). The EU project Common Access to Biological Resources and Information (CABRI) implemented unified access to culture collection catalogues, also guaranteeing a common level of quality of material and related information. Its network services were set up in 2000 and are still running, providing information on more than 100,000 microbiological resources, mainly microbial strains, and allowing researchers to get in touch with collections and order strains of interest.In 2004, the European Strategic Forum for Research Infrastructure (ESFRI) programme was launched by the European Community, aiming at reorganizing all research infrastructures into a coherent cluster of interoperating initiatives. In the context of the ESFRI programme, the Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure (MIRRI) started its preparatory phase in 2012 aiming to provide
a wealth of microbial resources, associated data, taxonomic methods, and expertise to serve users' needs (www.mirri.org).