The Microbiota Vault's equitable biobanking framework

Drawing inspiration from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the Microbiota Vault represents a global initiative to safeguard microbiomes across human, animal, and environmental domains. Operating as a non-profit charity, the Microbiota Vault, acts at the request and on behalf of sovereign depositors worldwide, who have local working collections, to preserve backup copies of specimens of human or environmental origin. Depositors retain full control over the specimens they deposit in the Microbiota Vault. Upon explicit request by the depositing collections, sequence annotation of deposited materials will be provided and included in open-access databases. Making the annotated samples visible aims at creating a catalog of microbial diversity and empowers local working collections by connecting them to global research efforts. We will discuss our experiences when setting up this biobanking framework and how it relates to the principles of access and benefit sharing and to developments with respect to Digital Sequence Information.