The NHM is a partner of CryoArks, the initiative is bringing together the dispersed collections of frozen biodiversity material (including cell cultures) held in collections across the UK and increasing their discoverability and accessibility. As part of our educational work, my colleague has developed an animated educational video explaining what a zoological biobank is, how we store samples, what samples are stored, and how they’re used (in a zoo and conservation context).

The video ‘CryoArks - Animal biobanking for research and conservation’ can be found on our youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9sCDRgIbZo

We hope it will be an extremely useful resource that can be used by schools/educators/and the UKBRCN partners to help explain what a biological resource centre is and does. It is also now available with Welsh subtitles and we are in the process of developing Gaelic subtitles.