At the end of 2005 the Belgian Science Policy Office launched the project "Elaborating public culture collections of diatoms, polar cyanobacteria and mycobacteria in Belgium" in order to enlarge the patrimony and to broaden the scope and domain of the BCCM by supporting additional collections of interesting types of organisms. From the several research collections held in Belgian institutes, three collections were selected on the basis of the extent of their holdings, their uniqueness, and the associated scientific expertise:

• the diatom collection at the Ghent University
  
  
• the polar cyanobacteria collection at the University of Liège
  
  
• the mycobacteria collection at the Institute of Tropical Medicine in Antwerp

In spite of their obvious relevance to scientific, industrial, environmental, and medical R&D applications, all three of these organism types are largely under-represented in the public biological resource centres world-wide.

In 2009 the Belgian Science Policy Office decided to extend this collaboration and to allocate a yearly recurrent budget to these three collections. They will become internationally recognized, ISO 9001 certified, and public biological resource centres and will be gradually integrated into the BCCM consortium.