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.