| URL: | http://gcm.wfcc.info |
| Full name: | Global Catalogue of Microorganisms |
| Description: | Definition WFCC Global Catalogue of Microorganisms (GCM) is expected to be a robust, reliable and user-friendly system to help culture collections to manage, disseminate and share the information related to their holdings. It also provides a uniform interface for the scientific and industrial communities to access the comprehensive microbial resource information. Motivation The increasing demands on culture collections for authenticated, reliable biological material and associated information have paralleled the growth of biotechnology. In the WFCC guidelines, it is pointed out that collections should publish online or printed catalogue regularly to disseminate information of strains to promote scientific and industrial usages of holdings. However, according to the statistics, only nearly one-sixth of collections registered in CCINFO have their online catalogue, which greatly hinders the visibility and hence the accessibility of strains. WDCM will construct a data management system and a global catalogue to help organize, unveil and explore the data resources of its member collections. |
| Year founded: | 2013 |
| Last update: | 2013-06-01 |
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| Country/Region: | China |
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| University/Institution: | Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences |
| Address: | 1 West Beichen Road, Chaoyang District |
| City: | Beijing |
| Province/State: | Beijing |
| Country/Region: | China |
| Contact name (PI/Team): | Juncai Ma |
| Contact email (PI/Helpdesk): | ma@im.ac.cn |
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Global catalogue of microorganisms (gcm): a comprehensive database and information retrieval, analysis, and visualization system for microbial resources. [PMID: 24377417]
Throughout the long history of industrial and academic research, many microbes have been isolated, characterized and preserved (whenever possible) in culture collections. With the steady accumulation in observational data of biodiversity as well as microbial sequencing data, bio-resource centers have to function as data and information repositories to serve academia, industry, and regulators on behalf of and for the general public. Hence, the World Data Centre for Microorganisms (WDCM) started to take its responsibility for constructing an effective information environment that would promote and sustain microbial research data activities, and bridge the gaps currently present within and outside the microbiology communities. Strain catalogue information was collected from collections by online submission. We developed tools for automatic extraction of strain numbers and species names from various sources, including Genbank, Pubmed, and SwissProt. These new tools connect strain catalogue information with the corresponding nucleotide and protein sequences, as well as to genome sequence and references citing a particular strain. All information has been processed and compiled in order to create a comprehensive database of microbial resources, and was named Global Catalogue of Microorganisms (GCM). The current version of GCM contains information of over 273,933 strains, which includes 43,436 bacterial, fungal and archaea species from 52 collections in 25 countries and regions.A number of online analysis and statistical tools have been integrated, together with advanced search functions, which should greatly facilitate the exploration of the content of GCM. A comprehensive dynamic database of microbial resources has been created, which unveils the resources preserved in culture collections especially for those whose informatics infrastructures are still under development, which should foster cumulative research, facilitating the activities of microbiologists world-wide, who work in both public and industrial research centres. This database is available from http://gcm.wfcc.info. |