Link to the project Consortium: BELSPO

Sciensano, a Belgian public health institute houses Fungi Collection for Human & Animal Health (BCCM/IHEM), a fungi collection dedicated to human and veterinary health which is embedded in the mycology & aerobiology laboratory. The collection preserves almost 16000 strains, the majority being human and animal pathogens, allergenic strains, mycotoxin producing species or various contaminants, isolated from clinical cases or from the human environment. The BCCM/IHEM collection has expertise in the isolation, characterisation and identification of these biomedical fungi by classical or molecular means or by MALDI-TOF MS, as the collection currently houses the largest reference spectra database in the world for medically relevant fungi. Moreover, the collection performs antifungal resistance testing, strain typing and other customer oriented analyses. BCCM/IHEM will offer access to its expertise and infrastructure in the frame of the Transnational Access pilot programme in IS MIRRI21.