Peter Dawyndt, Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Ghent University, Krijgslaan 281, S9, B-9000 Ghent, Belgium
Cultured micro-organisms form a vital cornerstone of all microbial research. With more than 500 biological resource centres worldwide, it may however become a daunting task to track down an interesting specimen of a given taxon. Moreover, as biological research is inherently distributed in nature, with many researchers in different research institutes collecting data on the same organisms, knowledge generated on these micro-organisms also has a tendency to become spread across the information jungle. As science and technology are moving rapidly, thereby increasingly making use of the scientific merits of previous research results, instant and effortless visibility of this creative and scientific downstream information has become imperative for the realization of successful innovation chains that take full opportunity of the exploitation of biological resources. The StrainInfo.net bioportal (www.straininfo.net) was established to stimulate this movement towards using multi-perspective integrated information in a broadened biological and clinical context. It brings together the biological material kept at multiple biological resource centres into a single portal interface, with direct pointers to the relevant information at the collections' websites, and provides both historical traces and geographic distribution of the organisms they keep in culture. In addition, each organism is automatically linked to related sequences in the public domain and refers to all known scientific publications that deal with the organism. As the bioportal further unfolds itself as a helpful add-on to the microbiologists' toolbox, we hope to gather around it a growing community of users that might become active contributors to both its content and implementation.
Web Page:
www.StrainInfo.net
