This WDCM (World Data Centre of Microorganisms) catalog was produced to enable broader and easier access to the reference strains. This collection is affiliated with the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC), a collection of various national culture collections. It fulfills a need expressed by these bodies for a unique system of identifiers for strains recommended for use in quality assurance.
The World Data Centre for Microorganisms (WDCM) was established 50 years ago as the data center of the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC)—Microbial Resource Center (MIRCEN). WDCM aims to provide integrated information services to microbiologists all over the world. With the development of sequencing technology, sequence data has increased exponentially. Culture collections have a growing function as data and information repositories to serve academia, industry, and the public. WDCM promotes the access and use of data and information and coordinates international cooperation between culture collections, scientists, and other user communities.
Many strains are stored in more public culture collections as it makes the strains widely available to the scientific community, and also acts as a backup. This overlap may have arisen because the person that first isolated the strain deposited it in more than one collection, but sometimes culture collections share strains too.
No culture collection can absolutely guarantee strain equivalency – errors occasionally happen, and in very few cases, genetic drift may alter the properties of the strains between collections – but these are rare occurrences.
You can assume that the mentioned collection numbers, under a WDCM number, are exactly the same strain. In practice, this does not always appear to be the case. In the validated fasta library, not all strains’ entire genome is known yet. This means that it cannot be stated with certainty whether all the mentioned strains are the same and which strain is the true one if there of differences. This is also the case for WDCM0005 Campylobacter jejuni. A number of strains from different collections are listed, but since there is no validated library, these strains can differ from each other, but they are all Campylobacter jejuni.
