Data management in culture collections

Culture collections preserve the living material and the associated information alike. The physical culture and its properties are both important for users. Strain characteristics can be inferred from a detailed description of environmental parameters and results of ex situ experiments. Some of these results will be published in the literature but others remain unpublished, such as strain tests performed by collection staff. Culture collections that did not restrict their holdings to a particular taxonomic or functional group of microorganisms consequently employed a large diversity of tests. In order to handle that heterogeneous information on a large scale, data management in culture collections is rapidly gaining importance. Data management includes several mobilisation and harmonisation steps. This chapter provides examples of data types routinely accumulated by culture collections, and how this information is unified, analysed and shared. Databases that accumulate and display records from collections worldwide become a window into modern big data research. In this chapter, we review different strategies for building up strain-related databases, point to important difficulties and name possible solutions.