Portuguese Blue Biobank joins the Arctos consortium

CIIMAR, the leading entity of the Portuguese Blue Biobank, signed a memorandum of understanding today with the Arctos Consortium, an international system for managing biological collections. This system will centralize and uniformly organize the information from Portuguese marine collections, integrating international standards of nomenclature in biological diversity (Darwin Core).

The Portuguese Blue Biobank includes collections from partner institutions namely the Portuguese Institute for the Sea and the Atmosphere, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Aveiro, Centre of Marine Sciences (CCMAR), GreenCoLab, and S2AQUAcoLAB. This network of national marine biobanks makes marine biodiversity data accessible to scientific and industrial users through the digitization of collections.

CIIMAR has now joined a community of international institutions and a platform that has a database of over 5 million organism records.