Platform 3
Microbial & Human Tissue Repositories

Our Platform 3 Experts

Dr Karen Madsen IMPACTT lead Microbial and human tissue repositories
Dr Karen Madsen
Dr Joe Harrison IMPACTT lead Microbial and human tissue repositories
Dr Joe Harrison

“We aim to provide rich open-source repositories of microbes and biospecimens together with expertise and guidance for isolation and functional analysis of microbial species to advance translational microbiome research.”

Additional support for Platform 3 provided by Dr. Jens Walter at the University of Alberta.

What We Offer

Alberta Microbiota Repository (AMBR)

The Alberta Microbiota Repository (AMBR) is a collection of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, fungi gathered from diverse sources, including clinical samples from every niche of the human body in healthy volunteers. Click here to see the AMBR database, and contact us if you’d like to make a request.

AMBR is finding ways to culture and identify previously unknown microorganisms from the human body, extending our understanding of human microbial biodiversity, and reinvigorating culturomics, which is essential for causation testing of the microbiota in human health and disease.

CEGIIR Human Sample Biobank

The Centre of Excellence for Gastrointestinal Inflammation and Immunity Research (CEGIIR) has a Biobank that contains more than 80,000 human samples (blood, urine, human tissue, breast milk, cord blood, etc.) collected from more than 5,000 adults specifically for microbiome research. Click here for more information about CEGIIR and the human sample Biobank, and contact us if you’d like to make a request.

Other Resources

International Biorepositories

PiBAC: Pig Intestinal Bacterial Collection
Dr. Tom Clavel and colleagues curated a publicly available repository of cultured commensal bacteria strains from the pig intestine.

HPMC: Human Pan-Microbe Communities Database
Dr. Trevor Lawley and colleagues curated a searchable, metagenomic resource to facilitate investigation of human gastrointestinal microbiota with more than 1,800 samples.

Standard Operating Procedures

The International Human Microbiome Standards (IHMS) project has coordinated the development of SOPs designed to optimize data quality and comparability in the human microbiome field. Includes SOPs for sample collection, identification, extraction, sequencing, and data analysis, all found here.

The NIH Human Microbiome Project (HMP) Core Microbiome Sampling Protocol A can be found here.

Coming soon:

  • SOPs for longterm storage of microbial samples
  • SOPs on enriching for targeted bacteria from selected body sites
  • Genetic Engineering: two-step allelic exchange, lambda Red-recombineering, CRISPR-Cas9-assisted genome editing resources
  • Full genome sequencing resources

Articles & Publications

Contact us if you don’t have access to these publications.

Wallace et al. 2011. Human Gut Microbiota and its Relationship to Health and Disease. Nutr Rev. 69(7): 392-403.

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