Management of the Collections

The biological collections are essential to ensure the biodiversity preservation. At Fiocruz, they perform services of preservation, maintenance, supply, and taxonomic characterization and identification of biological material for research development in science, technology and innovation, and in epidemiological surveillance, in accordance with the national and international norms and legislations in place.

The movement of organization and institutional recognition of the Fiocruz biological collections started in 2006, with the creation of the Fiocruz Permanent Forum of Biological Collections, composed by representatives from the Technical-Scientific Unities, besides the Coordination of Technological Management (Gestec). The Vice-Presidency of Research and Reference Laboratories (VPPLR) has continued this process, and due to its importance transformed the Forum in the Technical Chamber of Fiocruz Biological Collections.

One of the results of this movement is the Institutional Document for policy development for biological collections at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation, from which it was started the process of institutional recognition, formalized by the Manual of Organization of Fiocruz Biological Collections and by the ordinance 327/2010-PR that approved the Manual.
The aim is to ensure that the conditions for the services, the biological materials and the associated information that are offered by the collections to the epidemiological surveillance network, the academia and the industry, are of excellent quality. For that the procedures have being standardized, with main focus on quality and data management of these collections, and so ensure that they also comply with their primary objective, to be repositories of the Brazilian biodiversity.

Quality and data management

There is great institutional effort for the implementation of the quality management system, in accordance to the standard NBR ISO/IEC 17025:2005 and to the Best Practice Guidelines for Biological Resource Centers of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which includes the Biosecurity (a set of institutional and personal security measures and procedures designed to prevent the loss, theft, misuse, diversion or intentional release of pathogens, or parts of them, and toxin-producing organisms); and of the System of Information Collections of Biotechnological Interest (SICol) for the data and information management in microbiological collections. For the zoological collections, a data and information management system is has being developed and implemented in all these collections. All Fiocruz microbiological and zoological collections are integrated to speciesLink and being integrated to Information System on Brazilian Biodiversity (SiBBr) and Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).

Based on the experiences with its microbial collections, Fiocruz has been strongly dedicated to the construction of the Biological Resources Center for Health (CRB-Health) that will be constituted by microorganisms related to tropical diseases of Latin America, including neglected diseases, as well as microorganisms with taxonomical and biotechnological interest. The CRB-Health will offer certified products and services to the scientific community, the industry and the Unified Health System (SUS), in order to provide sustainability for biotechnological innovations in health, as well as the preservation of the microbial diversity in the country.

See the complete list  Fiocruz Biological Collections