In her third blog post, Samantha talk us through how biodiversity biobanks are vital to help us face current and future global health and environmental challenges. She also highlights the urgent need to increase worldwide visibility of biodiversity biobanks and ensure their financial security.
In this blog post, Samantha, a second-year student of the MSc Biobanks & Complex Data Management of the Côte d’Azur University in France, currently working with a CryoArks collection at the Natural History Museum’s Molecular Collections Facility (MCF), highlights the importance and challenges of managing data associated with biodiversity collections to ensure these collections can be used in current and future research projects.
Find out how Samantha, a second-year student of the MSc Biobanks & Complex Data Management of the Côte d’Azur University in France, is helping the NHM Molecular Collections Facility and CryoArks organise an impressive and unique collection of UK wildlife to make it readily available for research and species conservation.
CryoArks has a new biobank film! Our short film explains what a zoological biobank is, what it contains, and how researchers can use the samples to answer a wide range of questions and help conservation.
On the 13th July, the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hosted a live online event on ‘Biobanking for conservation: Why cryopreservation is essential for addressing our biodiversity crisis’. Invited speakers included Paul Pearce-Kelly (ZSL), Professor William Holt (University of Sheffield and Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), Kirsty Lloyd (CryoArks, Natural History Museum), and Dr Mary Hagedorn (Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology).
At this year’s Edinburgh Science Festival, the CryoArks teams based at the National Museums Scotland (NMS) and at the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland (RZSS) participated in a webinar chaired by zoologist, writer and broadcaster, Jules Howard.
Dr Andrew Kitchener talks about the sample collection in the CryoArks hub at the National Museums Collection Centre for the NatSCA blog.
There are hundreds of species represented in the Paignton Zoo collection and CryoArks research fellow, Gill Murray Dickson, chats to vet nurse Kelly Damon to find out more about how samples are routinely collected during post-mortem examination and why samples collected from zoo animals are so important for conservation research.
Samples from over 220 different animal species at Paignton Zoo are being stored by scientists at the wildlife conservation charity as part of a project to give researchers around the world access to biological samples from endangered species and other wildlife. Now, over 1,000 samples from this collection are stored at the RZSS Biobank, one of the CryoArks hubs in Scotland.
Artwork and branding by Pretty Sciences.
