Joint Biobanking Conference 2025

South Africa

This year saw SANBI and the BBSA hosting the biggest biobanking event in Africa: the GGBN / ISBER Joint Biobanking Conference 2025.

The conference, a joint effort by the Global Genome Biodiversity Network (GGBN), International Society for Biological and Environmental Repositories (ISBER), was held at the spectacular Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden, Cape Town, South Africa, from 29 September – 3 October 2025.

With this year’s conference theme, “Where worlds align: biodiversity and human biobanks. Same, but different”, the conference brought together experts in human and biodiversity biobanking to talk shop, share solutions and discuss their work, opportunities and challenges.

Over twenty of those experts were from members of the BBSA Community – including speakers, poster presenters, and representatives on the Local Organising Committee (thank you, Victoria and Kim) and the Scientific Community (thanks to Anita, Puseletso and Kim again).

Find out more about the conference here. And for those who attended, or who are just very curious, try to spot the BBSA attendees in the picture gallery here. There’s still lots more available, not to worry…keep reading for more on that.

SANBI CEO Mr. Shonisani Munzhedzi will open proceedings, and the Department of Science & Innovation (DSI) will conduct the formal launch. Researchers from biobanks all over South Africa will discuss the utility of biobanks for food security, conservation, biotechnology and capacity development, and the challenges biobanks face in pursuit of this.

We hope that you will join us for this event which provides a unique opportunity to build the biodiversity biobanking community in South Africa.

For more information on the official launch of the BBSA, please consult the attached programme or read this. And for further enquiries about the launch, the network or related matters, contact Michelle Hamer at m.hamer@sanbi.org.za.

MICHELLE’S MESSAGE

Welcome To The First BBSA Forum

“As biobankers, we’re all confronted with similar challenges – and in some ways they may be even more severe in developing countries. Here we have a lot of opportunities…but also a lot of responsibilities. And often, not a lot of resources to tackle them with.”

Those were the words of keynote speaker Prof Michelle Hamer at the opening of the Joint Biobanking Conference 2025 — who was speaking, of course, from long experience. An Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Life Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, she was employed from 2009 until the end of 2024 at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI) where she was responsible for establishing and leading two national research infrastructure projects, the Natural Science Collections Facility (from 2015) and – of course – the Biodiversity Biobanks South Africa (from 2018).

“The BBSA network is a very wide range of institutions and types of biobanks that do different things in diverse ways, operating in different contexts. How do you get them all working together, to have a common purpose, and a common strategy – because if everybody is doing their own thing, its difficult to show impact or to measure the outputs against” she said. “We need one story – and it’s only late in my career as head of the BBSA that this story has become evident.”

Find out more about Michelle’s keynote, the story that unites biodiversity biobanks, and the launch of the Biobanking Africa Conference here.

Michelle Hamer BBSA Lead

Michelle Hamer – Former Project Lead
Biodiversity Biobanks South Africa

BBSA COMMUNITY
Share Your Joint Biobanking Conference Story

Many interesting ideas were presented at the Joint Biobanking Conference, and many stories were shared. But we’d like to keep the momentum going. So if you’d like to discuss any of the ideas presented at the meeting, or that have occurred to you since, we’d love to hear them. Perhaps you’d like to set up a working group, or host a webinar – or even just share a story or two about your Joint Biobanking Conference experience. Or perhaps you’d like to share a picture or two – or find some of the many other pics that were taken of the conference?

Just contact us at info@bbsa.org.za or n.kruger@sanbi.org.za, and we’ll see what we can do, not to worry.

What are biodiversity biobanks?

Biodiversity biobanks are repositories of biologically relevant resources, including reproductive tissues such as seeds, eggs and sperm, other tissues including blood, DNA extracts, microbial cultures (active and dormant), and environmental samples containing biological communities….