MIRRI - Microbial Resources Research Infrastructure. The future European portal to access a broad scope of high quality microbes and related services

Microorganisms hold a high inherent value proved by the large number of applications in which they have been used. Public Culture Collections have the mandate to conserve microbial diversity and associated data and to make it available to the scientific community. Nevertheless, resources  and  information  are  currently  fragmented  and  miss  harmonized  levels  of  quality rendering suboptimal exploitation of the available microbial diversity.
MIRRI (www.mirri.org), Microbial Resources Research Infrastructure, is a pan-European distributed research infrastructure in its preparatory phase, which aims to support research and development in all fields of biotechnology (blue, green, red and white). Currently, more than 30 public  culture  collections  and  research  institutes  from  19  European  countries  collaborate  to establish this infrastructure. MIRRI will coordinate offer and expertise and will provide a single
entry point to resources, databases, training and expertise in the field of  microbiology. MIRRI will also  support  users  dealing  with  microbial  resources  in  issues  such  as  Biosecurity,  Intellectual Property Rights, Access and Benefit Sharing, etc., facilitating legal compliance. Moreover, MIRRI aims to apply a holistic approach to data management, improving interoperability of data sets to
facilitate generation of knowledge from data. Tailor-made solutions for biotech  companies and participation in projects to sustain the bioeconomy will also be part of the MIRRI action plan.