History of the national CRB-Anim infrastructure: BRCs for domestic animals

Created by a project "Infrastructure" of the first Programme Investissements d'Avenir, CRB-Anim aims at integrating and reinforcing the biological resource centers (CRB) conserving reproductive and genomic material for domesticated animal species raised in France, mammals, birds, fish and shellfish.

The CRB-Anim infrastructure associates public research organizations (INRAE, CNRS), higher education institutions (University of Rennes I, AgroParisTech, Ecoles Nationales Vétérinaires, Oniris), a private platform, the company ANTAGENE, which host genomic collections for breeders.

This national infrastructure has 6 nodes located near Paris, Rennes, Nantes, Lyon and Guadeloupe. These nodes are linked to research partners from IFREMER and INSERM, professional breeding organizations, animal insemination centers and National Veterinary Schools.

The BRCs of the infrastructure store approximately 600,000 biological samples (semen, embryos, cells, tissues, DNA, RNA).

CRB-Anim responds to two national priorities for research and innovation in health, food, well-being and the urgent need to preserve biodiversity..

The infrastructure responds to two major challenges for science and society:

• the erosion of biodiversity, in particular in livestock species subject to intensive selection
• and the rise of genomics, which opens a new era for understanding the relationships between phenotype and genotype and for exploiting the phenotypic wealth resulting from animal domestication.

This research needs access to characterized biological samples and to tools for cryopreserving biological resources.