The Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance have jointly published the list for optimization and adjustment of national technology resource sharing service platforms, which includes National Microbial Data Center (NMDC), one of the twenty national science data centers on Jun 5, 2019,.

NMDC is based on Institute of Microbiology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, which is jointly established by the Institute of Oceanology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, National Institute for Communicable Disease Control and Prevention Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention and Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The total data resources of the center exceed 300 TB, with more than 4 billion data records. The data covers the whole life cycle of microbiological research, including microbiological resources, microorganisms and cross-technology methods, research process and engineering, microbiome, microbial technology and literature, patents, experts and achievements.

The center has been working on data collection in the field of microbiology for more than 30 years. The data are derived from more than 100 institutes such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences, other scientific research institutes, universities, enterprises and so on.

By receiving data from 120 culture collections in 46 countries for data collection and sharing globally, it is the most important center in the field of microbiology worldwide. With a perfect data quality control system and a multi-level data quality indexing system, the center is taking the lead in applying for and developing the first ISO international standard in this field.

On this basis, it has developed a proprietary data management platform, which has been used by hundreds of institutes domestic and abroad.

With the accumulated microbiological data around the world, it cooperates with the International Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) Information Exchange to formally put forward to CBD the construction plan of the information platform for the transfer of global microbial resources, which provides important support for the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol for all countries in the world. The research on the mechanism of cross-species transmission of influenza viruses in China is supported.

At present, it has published many papers in the world-class journals such as Science and Nature. The fungal DNA barcode database established by the center has been applied in Ningbo and other ports, which effectively supports the rapid identification of harmful species and protects the national biosafety.

The achievements of the center have been published in the database special issue of the international first-class data Journal Nucleic Acid Research (Influencing Factor 11.7). A report on the development of microbial resources in China will be released every year, which attracts wide attention from the society and is reported by news broadcasting and other media.

Scientific microbiological data is an important guarantee for scientific research and technological innovation activities, and also a powerful support for improving the level of scientific and technological public services. According to the positioning of the national public platform, its data resources are all freely shared, and the production, storage and processing of microbiological data are standardized.

In accordance with the requirements of the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance, NMDC will further strengthen the management of the platform, promote the convergence and integration with the national platform, exploit the effective utilization of microbial resources and support capacity for scientific and technological innovation, thus providing high quality technology sharing services for scientific research, technological progress and social development.