MIRRI

Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure - MIRRI

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 Obiettivo del progetto (Objective)

MIRRI will be a pan-European distributed RI providing microbiological services, thus facilitating access to high quality microorganisms, their derivatives and associated data for research, development and application. It will connect resource holders with researchers and policy makers to deliver the resources and services more effectively and efficiently to meet the needs of innovation in biotechnology. The RI builds upon 60 microbial domain resource centres (BRCs) in 26 European countries; collectively they provide access to more than 350,000 strains of microorganisms. Microorganisms provide essential raw material for biotechnology - but to date less than 1% of the estimated number of species are described and available to be harnessed by man. As new species are discovered, expertise is difficult to locate to ensure correct identification. Public sequence databases provide modern tools for identification but the information is often of poor quality and often not backed up by the biological material to enable validation of data. The current fragmented resource distributed across Europe needs to be coordinated and operated to common standards with facilitating policy to help focus activities to the big challenges in healthcare, food security, poverty alleviation and climate change. Lacking infrastructure, policy framework and governance structures will be defined in the preparatory phase, as will be the links to researchers and policy makers. Specialist clusters will address priority issues and output steering. BRCs should be placed on national road maps, ensuring the pan-European strategy can be implemented. Cross discipline interactions with other RIs will lead to new approaches. Linking the microbial strain information to other relevant data will allow their full exploitation. Appropriate data mining solutions will enable focussing acquisition and delivery strategies, thus bridging current gaps and improving user access.

Introduzione (Teaser)

Microbial resources are an essential raw material for the advancement of biotechnology, human health, and research and development in life sciences. EU funding is making sure that Europe is at the forefront of microbial research with the establishment of integrated national public collections.

Descrizione progetto (Article)

Microorganisms serve as natural resources for the production of antibiotics and other secondary metabolites of therapeutic value. They are key players in improving food, increase agricultural productivity and they are most productive biological players in waste management, decomposing and recycling both nature's and industrial waste.

Traditionally, Europe has been the cradle of public collections of microbes but the existing landscape is fragmented, lacking coherence and coordination. The EU-funded ' Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure - MIRRI' (http://www.mirri.org (MIRRI)) project is integrating the main public microbial resource centres and their supporting services and data into a novel pan-European coordinated microbial research infrastructure.

More than 40 public culture collections and research institutes from 19 European countries are collaborating to better serve all user needs. Collections are divided into three broad groups, specialized on medical, applications (e.g. agriculture and waste management), and physiological and ecological biodiversity.

At the halfway stage, the Preparatory Phase has achieved most key goals, built on previous and ongoing research initiatives and the Global Biological Resource Centre Network project that is directly related to the needs of MIRRI. The first parts of the business and financial plan, governance structure statutes and MIRRI charter have been prepared.

Individual partner strengths will help to fill user needs. The stakeholder community is very wide-ranging and MIRRI is defining communication channels and stimulating collaboration between partners and individual stakeholders.

Implementation of a legal status operating on a non-profit basis for the European Research Infrastructure Consortium (ERIC) is a key goal. After establishment of a seat for headquarters (Central Coordinating Unit (CCU)), this will provide a common access portal to resources and data, including appropriate facilities, support and expertise available in Member States.

The central theme for MIRRI deliverables is to provide a network where the quality of collections can be increased, and data sharing and modelling will bring about cost efficiencies and new tools. Impact on society will be to improve the economy and create employment in biotech areas in health care and food production and security.