Deposit of Isolates from Microbiomes and Special Collections

The DSMZ welcomes bulk deposits (>10 isolates) of microbial strain collections from specific host species, environmental habitats, or built environments, as well as special collections comprising taxonomically or functionally similar groups.
Bulk deposits are time-intensive and take considerably longer to process than single strains. We therefore encourage depositors to start bulk deposits as early as possible in their projects to have them ready before the submission of accompanying manuscripts. Requests for urgent processing of bulk deposits during the revision phase of a manuscript cannot be considered.

The bulk deposition process

Bulk deposits are processed in a standardised 3-step procedure.

  1. Depositors are asked to fill out the Excel Bulk Deposit Accession Form covering all relevant strain information and sign the Bulk Deposit Agreement.
  2. The coordinating curator requests the shipment of a first batch of up to 10 test strains for quality and legal checks as required for deposition in the DSMZ collection.
  3. If all strains of step 2 pass these checks, the coordinating curator requests the remaining strains to be subsequently shipped in batches of 30-40 strains at a time. After the processing of each batch is completed, the next batch will be requested until the entire bulk deposit has been processed.

StrainInfo DOI registration

Depositors are strongly encouraged to request that data on their strains is added to the StrainInfo database. StrainInfo DOIs can then be provided early in the deposition process and can be used in publications and sequence submissions, which enhances the traceability of the strains.

Once the respective cultures have been received by the DSMZ and quality checked, the responsible curator can approve StrainInfo integration of strain data from the bulk submission.  Strains are then assigned DOIs and published on StrainInfo marked “Deposition in progress”. Once the DSMZ deposition process of the respective strains is complete, they are set to “published” with an online catalogue status of “available”.