Edition 15 - May, 2004

MOSAICS starts

Past and present challenge

The mission of culture collections such as the BCCM consortium involves the conservation, study, characterisation and distribution of microbiological resources – the biological material itself and the related information – for scientific, technical, industrial, educational and training purposes, irrespective of whether these activities have for-profit or non-profit goals.
The present and future challenges faced by culture collections are not only scientific and technical but also legal and administrative: how can the recommendations and provisions of various international, supra-national, national, and regional conventions and laws be efficiently implemented in daily operations?
In 1992, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) enshrined the principle that the huge diversity of the Earth’s biological resources, from the vast rain forests to the invisible microbe, should be used for the benefit of all. The EU has developed guidelines and projects to help achieve this goal. Already in 1999, it supported the MOSAICC project, which was coordinated by BCCM, to develop a code of conduct as a tool for microbiologists to implement the CBD at the microbial level. In October 2001, the CBD ad hoc working group on access and benefit sharing produced the Bonn Guidelines, which are remarkably compatible with MOSAICC although the latter had been developed two years previously. Encouraged in its approach and building on the past, the EU has approved the Specific Support Action MOSAICS elaborated by BCCM to promote sustainable use of resources at the small end of the scale, i.e., microbial resources.

The future

MOSAICS (Micro-Organisms Sustainable Use and Access Management Integrated Conveyance System) will start in the Spring and take 18 months to set up a system to manage access to, and transfer of, microbial resources. It will make it easier for scientists to share genetic information about microbes while safeguarding intellectual property rights. There will be a particular focus on the safety and health of Europe’s food supplies. Here microbes are both a resource, for example, for probiotic foods and bio-pesticides, and a potential threat as regards plant disease, food spoilage, and contamination.

Three-stage process

MOSAICS has particularly highlighted three critical issues in the harmonised implementation of the CBD provisions on access and benefit sharing, the application of intellectual property rights and many other regulations covering the flows of biological resources, including plant and animals. MOSAICS will seek answers to these problems.
Assets cannot be exchanged until their value has been agreed. The first stage in freeing up access to microbial resources is to find a reliable way to assign an economic value to them. Methods studied in the project will include replacement value, market value, production cost, credit-debit balance, and conservation cost. These will be synthesised in EVa (Economic Valuation) to create socially, economically, and environmentally sound methods for pricing microbial resources. The second requirement concerns the transparent tracking of microbes during transactions. ADaM (Access Distribution and Management) will develop standard documents and procedures to register the point of origin of the resource and track it to its destination.
The last stage, the Integrated Conveyance System (ICS) itself, will combine valuation and trail finding in a full system for the open trading and sharing of the benefits of microbial resources. This is a practical scheme that complements legislative changes and is expected to be used internationally to promote access to microbial resources and to share the benefits they offer. Such a system can be effective only if it is attractive to all of the stakeholders, in other words, it must bring more profit and fewer administrative burdens, the term “profit” being taken in the broad sense, that is, in terms of the total scientific, technical, social, environmental and economic benefit.

MOSAICS will work closely with other initiatives to promote access and benefit sharing, including the CBD working group on this subject, the OECD’s Biological Information Task Force, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility. It will liaise with experts in similar biotech fields and in plant and animal resources. The Project partners include members from developed and developing countries, international organisations, European and non-European partners as well as branch federations. This collaboration should ensure endorsement of the project’s Integrated Conveyance System by national and international scientific federations of microbiologists. The data relating to ICS will be exchangeable in electronic form.

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