South African National Parks

Researchers at the SANParks Veterinary Wildlife Services Biobanks at  Skukuza and Kimberley collect samples from, and conduct research on, dozens of species from all over South Africa – promoting conservation from rhinos to lions, and more.

South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity
With over a million aquatic specimens, including amphibians, cephalopods, tunicates and diatoms, and several coelacanths, the South African Institute for Aquatic Biodiversity (NRF-SAIAB) is an internationally-recognised centre for the study of aquatic biodiversity.

South African National Biodiversity Institute

The South African National Biodiversity Institute is the host institution for the BBSA, and also manages and maintains several biobanks, including the:
Indigenous Plant DNA Biobank
SANBI Wildlife Biobank
SANBI Seed Bank

University of Pretoria Forestry, Agriculture and Biotechnology Institute (FABI)

The FABI fungal culture collection is the largest collection of fungal cultures and the biggest tree pathogenic fungi collection on the African continent, housing more than 60,000 fungal strains from FABI researchers and their global collaborators.

Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development
The National Plant Genetic Resources Center collects characterizes and evaluates South Africa’s plant genetic resources for food and agriculture.
The Grootfontein Biobank for SA sheep and goat breeds collects and store biological samples, phenotypic and genomic data from resource and reference sheep and goat flocks.

University of Free State’s Department of Microbial, Biochemical and Food Biotechnology
The University of the Free State Yeast Culture Collection is a national resource for yeast diversity research, housing a collection of over 3000 yeast isolates from various habitats in South Africa and worldwide – the largest collection of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere.

University of Western Cape Institute of Microbial Biotechnology and Metagenomics (IMBM)
The IMBM is well known for its research in the fields of microbial biotechnology, bioactive discovery and microbial ecology. The IMBM microbial biobank contains about 4 000 bacterial strains from a range of South African marine and other unique environments.

Affiliated biobanks participate in some BBSA activities and initiatives, but operate according to their own access policies and implement their own standards, and that are not eligible for resourcing from the BBSA. The aim is that affiliated biobanks will become core biobanks or transfer their holdings to core biobanks in the future.

One such affiliated biobank is the bat biobank of the Durban Natural Science Museum (DNSM), a subset of the DNSM mammal collection which forms part of the BBSA’s fellow SARIR project, the Natural Sciences Collections Facility (NSCF). For more information on the bat biobank, please see here.

There may be several other BBSA-affiliated biobanks. If you would like to know more, or you would like to be affiliated with the BBSA, please contact us here.