Network (MIRCEN) with 22 member collections in industrialised and developing countries.
A survey based on a written questionnaire was organized amongst members of WFCC and MIRCEN and completed by in-depth personal interviews. 119 collections returned the written questionnaire and 12 follow-up personal interviews were organised. The written questionnaire specifically addressed the distribution patterns of the culture collections to other actors in the actor networks and aimed to quantify the relative importance of the commercial tier as expressed through the importance of formal Material Transfer Agreements and the adoption of International Standards Organisation (ISO) certification. The personal interviews with staff and researchers at the culture collections were focused on a selection of six collections in European countries, which are representative of different degrees of use of formal contracting and adherence to ISO certification. They were chosen within a relative homogeneous policy context (Europe), in order to better assess the impact of the adoption of commercial practices on the conservation and distribution choices in the PSMCs. They were completed with two interviews with officials of the umbrella organisations (WFCC and ECCO) and four interviews in developing countries to check the consistency of the results in a wider geographical context.
2. The importance of the basic research tier and the commercial tier
This section presents the analysis of the governance choices for conservation and distribution of microbial genetic resources in the PSMCs. It focuses on the identification of the players in the two major actor networks that play a role in the publicly available science infrastructure: the basic research tier and the commercial tier. The next section will analyse how these major actor networks increased or decreased in importance and assess their role in the governance choices on conservation and distribution of microbial materials.
The first question that needs to be asked concerns the role of the various actors in the organisation of conservation and distribution of strain holdings. This question was addressed in our survey amongst the WFCC members, the results of which are presented in Figure 1. The results show the significant number of new strains coming directly from in situ settings into the culture collections (37% from own collecting activities in the field
