The heterogeneity of public ex situ collections of microorganisms: Empirical evidence about conservation practices, industry spillovers and public goods

• Empirical evidence: privatisation of conservation choices of biodiversity patrimony.
• Strong privatisation of microbe category with marked collective good properties.
• Worldwide survey of 103 ex situ collections.
• Possibly skewing the future ex situ patrimony away from low probability-high impact events.

Public service (ex situ) micro-organism collections serve to secure genetic resources for unforeseen future needs, and importantly, to provide authenticated biomaterials for contemporaneous use in private and public entities and as upstream research materials. Hence, it is important to understand the functioning and strategic decisions of these providers of public good resources.2 The existing literature tends to use case studies of individual collections. This paper uses a unique worldwide survey of microbial collections to analyse the heterogeneity among culture collections, and to empirically assess the economic and institutional conditions that contribute to this heterogeneity with respect to conservation choice and associated industry spillovers. Results suggest that in the short run public-private partnerships may indeed support knowledge accumulation with particularly strong public good properties. It is important to be aware of this strong tie, in order to steer also the long term conservation patrimony into one that offers not only short term usability but also resilience to future unforeseen needs e.g. of emerging crop plagues.