The Interlab Cell Line Collection (ICLC) was established in 1994 as a core facility of the National Institute of Cancer Research. It supplies: human and animal cell lines; Short Tandem Repeat (STR) profiling of human cell lines; quality control service; mycoplasma detection and eradication service; safe deposit service and patent deposit service of cell lines and hybridomas. The catalogue of services is on-line, and the cell lines are distributed all over the world.

The term ‘biological resources’ is applied to the living biological material collected, held and catalogued in culture collections: bacterial and fungal cultures; animal, human and plant cells; viruses; and isolated genetic material. A wealth of information on these materials has been accumulated in culture collections, and most of this information is accessible. Digitalisation of data has reached a high level; however, information is still dispersed. Individual and coordinated approaches have been initiated to improve accessibility of biological resource centres, their holdings and related information through the Internet. These approaches cover subjects such as standardisation of data handling and data accessibility, and standardisation and quality control of laboratory procedures. This article reviews some of the most important initiatives implemented so far, as well as the most recent achievements. It also discusses the possible improvements that could be achieved by adopting new communication standards and technologies, such as web services, in view of a deeper and more fruitful integration of biological resources information in the bioinformatics network environment.

Common Access to Biological Resources and Information (CABRI) service is a ‘one-stop-shop’ for materials that are collected by a number of European culture collections that engage themselves in a quality service for the scientific community by adhering to Quality Guidelines for the management of resources and related information. It includes collections' catalogues that can be searched in an SRS implementation. A simple search facility, including a synonym search and a shopping cart, is also available. Within the European Biological Resource Centres Network (EBRCN) project, an extension and improvement of the catalogues' information is under way. This includes adding links to bibliographic databanks and sequence databases. Revision of ‘in-house’ controlled vocabularies used by data annotators is under way, in order to improve the setting up of external links, and new links to biochemical pathways databases are being set up for some of the catalogues. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Common Access to Biological Resources and Information (CABRI) service is a 'one-stop-shop' for materials that are collected by a number of European culture collections that engage themselves in a quality service for the scientific community by adhering to Quality Guidelines for the management of resources and related information. It includes collections' catalogues that can be searched in an SRS implementation. A simple search facility, including a synonym search and a shopping cart, is also available. Within the European Biological Resource Centres Network (EBRCN) project, an extension and improvement of the catalogues' information is under way. This includes adding links to bibliographic databanks and sequence databases. Revision of 'in-house' controlled vocabularies used by data annotators is under way, in order to improve the setting up of external links, and new links to biochemical pathways databases are being set up for some of the catalogues.

At present MPDB contains the description of more than 4000 oligonucleotides having a length between 10 to 100 bases. Information is recorded in the following predefined fields: Tipology, Sequence, Organism, Target Gene, Application, Methods, Technical Data and Bibliography, In the last year we have added new items under the fields ''Applications'' and ''Tipology'', and we have inserted a new field, the ''Methods''. Our modifications consider the recent developments of the molecular biology research, under the field ''Tipology'' we have listed the items ''Probe'' (PB), ''Primer'' (PM), ''Antisense Oligonucleotides'' (AS) and ''Peptide Nucleic Acid'' (PNA).

The Molecular Probe Data Base (MPDB) was carried out in order to collect and make available on-line information on synthetic oligonucleotides. It was developed within the Interlab Project, as part of the improvement of Italian research infrastructures. Major improvements have recently been made in the Molecular Probe Data Base both in terms of data content and new means of data access. At present MPDB contains information on 3000 oligonucleotides specific for 672 different genes including 573 human and 91 viral genes; about 2500 oligonucleotides are specific for human genes, while 441 recognize viral genes. MPDB was implemented by means of the Oracle (TM) relational database system. In this paper we presented recent results concerning applications for data insertion, update and searching.