Biobanking

Physical infrastructure for collecting, processing, cryopreserving and distributing human biospecimens at population or clinical-trial scale — the biospecimen logistics layer, not the genomic-data repository itself: UK Biobank in the EU, BioLife Solutions and Discovery Life Sciences in the US, the China National GeneBank in China, and the newly inaugurated Phenome-India National Biobank (CSIR-IGIB) in India.

Authenticated microbial type strains and WHO biological reference materials — the calibrated living standards underpinning pharmaceutical QC, diagnostics, taxonomy and patent deposit, held by a global network of biological resource centers from the century-old ATCC to NIBSC.