After years of working separately, the South African Institute of Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB) and Albany Museum have agreed to link collections for the benefit of science.
A memorandum of understanding was signed last month which SAIAB managing director, Prof Paul Skelton as a “coming together for the common good”.
After years of working separately, the South African Institute of Aquatic Biodiversity (SAIAB) and Albany Museum have agreed to link collections for the benefit of science.
A memorandum of understanding was signed last month which SAIAB managing director, Prof Paul Skelton as a “coming together for the common good”.
Under the agreement, SAIAB will house and curate genetic material of freshwater aquatic invertebrates that are lodged in the Albany Museum.
Albany Museum incurator scientist, Helen James felt there was a need for this agreement because “the storage of material for genetic studies is becoming an important part of a natural history museum’s function.
The Albany Museum does not have the facilities for this, but SAIAB does.” SAIAB senior aquatic biologist, Roger Bills finds this agreement particularly significant because, speaking from experience, “we catch with nets and when we do, we often find various invertebrates, we used to ship the invertebrates other than fish out to the Albany Museum and the frogs to Bayworld.”
Now genetic tissues and samples of invertebrates will be lodged in the SAIAB tissue biobank and the voucher specimens sent to the Albany Museum’s invertebrate collection.
The museum will donate the genetic tissue of all invertebrate vouchers lodged in its collection to SAIAB. These tissue samples will be linked through the database management systems of each institution.
Researchers working on tissues linked to the museum’s collection will be able to use the molecular preparation laboratory at SAIAB.
For Albany Museum, Bills said that the agreement allows SAIAB to provide the museum with material they are not able to collect themselves, especially broadening their collection range to Zambia, Angola and Mozambique.
Furthermore, “they can link their collections to a biobank without developing that biobank themselves,” added Skelton.
The relationship between the two scientific research institutes is nothing new said SAIAB’s database specialist Willem Coetzer.
“Albany Museum approached us in 2005 to develop a database for their natural history collections”. Albany Museum, like SAIAB is now using a database specifically designed for natural history collections.
