Table 1 List of acronyms

BRC: Biological Resource Centre

CC: Culture Collection

CABRI: Common Access to Biological Resources and Information

ECCO: European Culture Collections’ Organization

ELIXIR: European Life Science Infrastructure for Biological Information

EMbaRC: European Consortium of Microbial Resource Centres

EnvO: Environmental Ontology

ESFRI: European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures

GBIF: Global Biodiversity Information Facility

GBRCN: Global Biological Resource Centre Network

GCM: Global Catalogue of Microorganisms

IT: Information Technology

MEO: Metagenome and Microbes Environmental Ontology

MINE: Microbial Information Network Europe

MIRRI: Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure

NCBO: National Center for Biomedical Ontology

OBO: Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies Foundry

OECD: Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

R&D: Research and Development

SOP: Standard Operating Procedures

TDWG: Taxonomic Databases Working Group

WDCM: World Data Centre for Microorganisms

WFCC: World Federation of Culture Collections