The World Data Center for Microorganisms (WDCM) and the Center for Microbial Resources and Big Data of the Institute of Microbiology of Chinese Academy of Science (IMCAS) jointly released the 2016 Microbial Resource Development Report for China (hereinafter abbreviated as “Report”) on Sept. 6. According to the Report, China achieved significant progress in research on microbial resources from 2001 to 2015. Globally, China ranks first in the number of patents (patent families) and is second only to the United States in the number of papers in the field of microorganism, and it began to own the largest number of published patents (patent families) in the field of microorganism as from 2009.

According to Juncai MA, the director of the WDCM, the Report was completed by three CAS institutes: the Institute of Microbiology, Shanghai Information Center for Life Sciences, and Chengdu Documentation and Information Center. In the Report, scientists analyze scientific works (including papers and patents) related to microbial research based on microbial resource collections in China. It describes and evaluates the development of microbial research in China and provides a reference for formulating research plans and the direction of R &D.

According to statistics of Culture Collections Information Worldwide (CCINFO), a world directory of all registered culture collections, China has 33 culture collection centers, with 182,235 sharable bacterial strains. China’s total number of culture collections ranks fourth in the world. Culture collection centers worldwide preserve 96,907 patent-related strains, and 11,977 of them are in the China General Microbiological Culture Collection Center (CGMCC), making China rank second in culture preservation.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the WDCM. As a center of information on bacterial resources worldwide, the WDCM has storage of 2.5 million pieces of data on bacterial resources provided by 710 culture collection centers from 72 countries. The WDCM proposed and released the Beijing Declaration of Sharing Data on Microbial Resources Worldwide, and proposed a plan on international cooperation for informationizing major microbial resources, thus promoting international cooperation in microbial resources and informationization of global microbial resources to a new high.