In Russia, Lomonosov Moscow State University created a giant database as part of their Noah’s Ark project to catalogue and store all types of biomaterials from various origins. They hope it not only will store information about the biomaterials themselves but also store information on related studies, cultivation and other details about the biomaterials. They have imported over 500,000 herbarium samples and 10,000 microorganism samples into their database so far, with plans to add many more samples as new collections are gathered, making it quite an extensive library of data.
Piotr Kamenski, the Noah’s Ark project scientific coordinator told Phys.org that “A notable feature of the system is the option to automatically load known data about the stored samples from reputable international databases, such as Catalog of Life, NCBI GenBank and others. So a sample certificate could contain much information, including the full genomic sequence of an organism.”