Through this discussion, AMRRN (Australian Microbial Resources Research Network) welcomes your views, suggestions and advice on developing a strong microbial systematic and culture collection community in Australia. This forum also provides access to Australia’s microbial taxonomists and culture collection curators willing to share their knowledge and provide advice.

AMRRN aims to provide a national focus for research on Australian microbial diversity, microbial resources in culture collections, and microbial taxonomy. These fields underpin the life sciences and biotechnology but there is concern that teaching and research in microbial taxonomy is declining and that there is little opportunity to train the next generation of microbial taxonomists to support the future needs of science, industry, government, health, agriculture, and education and to develop biodiscovery and biotechnology. AMRRN is collaborating with Taxonomy Australia to make submissions to relevant bodies to urgently correct this situation. Similarly, AMRRN is collaborating in the NCRIS Atlas of Living Australia project which aims to provide integrated electronic access to information and biological material in Australia's animal, plant and microbial collections in museums, herbaria, universities and research institutes.

Recently AMRRN has formed the Council of Heads of Australian Collections of Microorganisms (CHACM) to formalise the networking of Australia's major microbial collections and to facilitate collaboration with the ALA project to meet the needs of collections and their users. Culture collections are considerably under-resourced in Australia compared with collections in Europe, Asia and the USA. Our geographical isolation, biosecurity issues, and shipping costs and delays necessitate the need for scientists to have fast access to reference material in properly resourced Australian collections.

 Your contributions to discussion of these and other relevant issues are welcome.

Lindsay Sly