Culture collections provide starting material for life science research, development and production. Especially in biotechnology, well characterised and pure microbial strains are essential for reproducible and safe bioprocesses. Culture collections also play a role as repositories of biological material for future applications and help to preserve biological diversity. In addition, they also maintain the know-how needed for more complex identification methods and help to develop new techniques. To enable culture collections to achieve higher quality standards, new certification guidelines for biological resource centres are currently being developed.