The NHM is the UK's national museum of natural history, a world centre of scientific excellence in taxonomy and biodiversity with 70 million specimens in its collections. An average of 25K new specimens are received each year, from focussed collections by researchers, opportunistic collecting, donations and bequests by scientists and public, and confiscations by Customs; all a source of genetic material for analysis.
The NHM Molecular Collections Facility (MCF), a centralised biorepository for collections destined for or created by molecular research internally and externally, built in 2011 was launched in February 2012. During this time, the facility set up, operations, and implementation of policy and procedures have tackled various obstacles in order to meet the imperative to bank genetic resource information in a race against time in the face of the current biodiversity crisis. The talk will share some experiences and challenges faced:
• Organisational and culture change; centralisation vs local laboratories, museum research and curation conflicts.
• Infrastructure considerations: essential environmental requirements, disaster planning, running costs/overheads.
• Access to local archival collections for centralisation (ownership issues). Marketing facility benefits for museum researcher/curator buy in.
• Harmonisation of internal/external data management and record systems (Botany, Entomology, Zoology databases): BIMS, new data capture, loan systems.
• Cold chain establishment: logistical difficulties in many biodiversity rich areas transporting genome quality samples from field to repository.
• Cost recovery business models for non human biobanks.
• Future proofing ultra-long term (museum timescale) storage, extraction methods, and future compliance issues (policy and procedure).

Jackie Mackenzie-Dodds: is the recently appointed manager of the new Molecular Collections Facility at the Natural History Museum (NHM) London. She has over 20 years of experience in and laboratory management and molecular biology research from both industry and academia (21 years at NHM, Royal Free Hospital Academic Department of Medicine, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Glaxo Group Research). Research at the NHM has included a variety of projects in non-human (plants and animals) in evolutionary development, phylogenetics and phylogeography. From 2008 – 2012 she has been actively involved in molecular collections management, research, and science policy collaborating in initiatives in the EU and US including GGBN, ISBER, ESBB, CPB (CETAF), SYNTHESYS. She was appointed manager of the NHM’s new biobank in February 2011 and is currently developing the facility to hold and curate around 2 million non human specimens representing global biodiversity, making them accessible to the wider scientific community.