A HANDY DATABASE FOR CULTURE COLLECTIONS WORLDWIDE - CCINFO-PC

Culture collections are reservoirs of cultivable microbes, cell lines and gene libraries. Their role and duty are to supply biological resou rces to biomedical communities; nevertheless, their visibility from th e public is low because most culture collections still have poor acces ses via the Internet. Therefore the WFCC World Data Center on Microorg anisms (WDCM) developed a database that runs on IBM PCs and compatible s, which are the most popular computer and will be as powerful as work stations. The database includes various information: activities of 484 culture collections from 58 countries; an integrated list of their ho ldings of bacteria, fungi and yeast; and data entry system for culture collections.