Biological Resource Center

A Biological Resource Centre (BRC) is considered to be one of the key elements for sustainable international scientific infrastructure, which is necessary to underpin successful delivery of the benefits of biotechnology, whether within the health sector, the industrial sector or other sectors, and in turn ensure that these advances help drive growth.

The OECD defines BRCs as follows:

"Biological Resource Centres are an essential part of the infrastructure underpinning biotechnology. They consist of service providers and repositories of the living cells, genomes of organisms, and information relating to heredity and the functions of biological systems. BRCs contain collections of culturable organisms (e.g. micro-organisms, plant, animal and human cells), replicable parts of these (e.g. genomes, plasmids, viruses, cDNAs), viable but not yet culturable organisms, cells and tissues, as well as databases containing molecular, physiological and structural information relevant to these collections and related bioinformatics."

BRCs retain collections of biological material and associated information to facilitate access to ex situ biological resources and to ensure that they remain available for sustainable use.

Biological resource collections are entities compliant with appropriate national law, regulations, and policies and have been constituted to fulfil many crucial roles, which include:

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