RARe on the National Research Infrastructure Roadmap 2021

The objective of the National Roadmap 2021 is to explain the French strategy in the field of Research Infrastructures until the next update, scheduled for 2025.

This renewal of RARE's position on the National Roadmap for Research Infrastructures demonstrates the recognition of our infrastructure and confirms the relevance of our objectives.

RARe's mission is three-fold:

• Optimize the functioning of BRCs and the management of collections
• To place biological resources at the service of research for the agro-ecological transition of agriculture, global health and the bioeconomy, by considering partnership research as well as fundamental research
• To improve the international visibility of its members' biological resources.

The objectives of the infrastructure are:

1- Organizational objectives are to pool skills and tools to harmonize procedures, centralize access to information and resources, generalize quality management and develop training. RARe is the reference for advising researchers collecting/conserving resources, repatriating collections, rationalizing dispersed collections.

2- Scientific objectives:

• to develop methods to preserve the reproductive potential of resources (cryobiology) and to characterize new resources (microbiome, organoids)
• to gather or produce data on collections and facilitate their (re)use
• to take advantage of historical or recent collections to analyze the spatio-temporal dynamics of biodiversity, particularly at the infra-specific level
• to preserve, characterize and provide reference samples to identify genes controlling phenotypes of interest.

3- Visibility-related objectives are to include data from RARe collections in relevant international databases, to register the collections in the European registry to facilitate their use in compliance with ABS rules.

RARe is the reference infrastructure for securing, documenting and distributing the resources of the Earth system biosphere. These are genetic, genomic and biological resources collected and characterized by research on domesticated animals, model or cultivated plants, wild relatives, forest species subject to forestry, microorganisms of agronomic or food interest and microbiota, microorganisms and organisms of the environment. RARe is positioned in the chapter 'Earth System and Environment' of the roadmap, while playing an important role in research in fundamental biology (animal, plant, microbial) with applications in health (animal models of genetic diseases), biotechnology and agroecology.