Culture collections of micro-organisms are important interfaces between providers and users of microbiological resources. They:

• conserve our microbial heritage
• preserve more than 1.000.000 cultures
• supply authentic cultures
• offer valuable services
• act as reference centres
• make microbiological material and related information available for all kind of scientific, industrial, and educational purposes.

Culture collections thus face primarily scientific and technical challenges, but must also overcome legal and administrative hurdles to give appropriate access to microbiological resources.

The legal and administrative challenges

Culture collections wonder how to implement in an efficient way, and at affordable cost, the numerous and diverse international, supra-national, and national rules regulating the flows and uses of biological resources, from the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to the application of intellectual property rights (IPR). In addition, security concerns now require extra attention and appropriate precautions.

To address this concern, a consortium of fifteen microbiological resources providers and users, coordinated by the Belgian Coordinated Collections of Micro-organisms (BCCM), has launched the MOSAICS project in 2004. MOSAICS stands for “Microorganisms Sustainable use and Access management Integrated Conveyance System”. It is funded by the Directorate General Research of the European Commission, under the Sixth Framework Program, in the scope of the Food Quality and Safety priority. The consortium of the MOSAICS project is made of partners from developed and developing countries, including culture collections, international organizations, branch federations and specialized research institutes.

MOSAICS, three key issues - three parts

Already in 1999, before MOSAICS, the Directorate General Research supported a project, MOSAICC, to develop a code of conduct as a practical tool for microbiologists to implement the CBD. This project was also coordinated by the Belgian Coordinated Collections of Micro-organisms (BCCM) and has identified three necessary features for a system to implement coherently the CBD provisions on Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS), IPR and other relevant regulations concerning access and use of (micro)biological resources.

MOSAICS central objective is the development of such an integrated conveyance system that:

• has reliable tools to evaluate the economic value of microbiological resources (EVA)
  
  
• disposes of validated model documents with standard provisions to enable tracking via an uncomplicated procedure, widely applied by microbiologists (ADAM)
  
  
• combines valuation and tracking in one system for trading of microbiological resources, with balanced benefit sharing for those that are entitled to be rewarded for the services and products they provide to society (ICS)

Economic valuation of microbiological resources (EVA)

Whatever form benefit sharing takes, there is a need for reliable methods to value the (micro) biological resources, since benefit sharing presupposes that there is an agreement on the value of the exchanged goods. At present time, documentation on economic valuation of microbiological resources can hardly be found. Methods applied to other natural resources are tested to check their validity for use with microbiological resources.

Material Transfer Agreement with standard contents (ADAM)

To abide by the CBD rules of access and to enable benefit sharing to take place, the key issue is tracking of (micro) biological resources. The MOSAICS procedure can be summarized as follows: register the source of the (micro) biological resource and track it up to its end destination. MOSAICS proposes standard contents for transfer documents, usually called Material Transfer Agreement (MTA), that register the original source and specify the conditions of transfer. MOSAICS work takes into consideration the activities in and around the CBD bodies, and other international initiatives related with management of resources such as the OECD Biological Resources Centers (BRC) Task Force, and the development of the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Easy procedure for transfer of microbiological resources - Integrated Conveyance System (ICS)

Documents like MTAs already exist; the main contribution of MOSAICS is to get more uniformity in their contents and to define the minimum set of information. MOSAICS also aims at organizing the electronic handling of these digitalized documents combined with identification codes, to enable fast, cost-effective, and reliable management of the (micro)biological resources and to provide the information related to their transfer to the rightful stakeholders. Such a system is not a direct control tool. Systems like MOSAICS can help culture collections and biotechnological industries in gaining competitive advantage in bio-prospecting activities.