The Micoteca da Universidade do Minho (MUM), in collaboration with the Chilean Universidad de La Frontera (UFRO), the IS_MIRRI21 EU project (https://ismirri21.mirri.org/), MIRRI-ERIC (https://www.mirri.org/), the Portuguese microBiological Resource Centre Network / MIRRI-PT Node (Pt-mBRCN, https://mbrcn.pt/), the Portuguese Society of Microbiology (SPM, https://spmicrobiologia.wordpress.com/) and the Portuguese Society of Biotechnology (SPBT, https://www.spbt.pt/), is very pleased to announce that the next 15th International Conference on Culture Collections (ICCC15) will be held in Braga, from 12 to 16 June 2023.

The ICCC is a regular conference organised by the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC, https://www.wfcc.info/) which represents 832 Culture Collections from 78 Countries and Regions, and collectively preserved more than 3.3 million microorganisms available for different user communities.

MUM is very proud to host this international conference with the motto “Exploiting Microbial Resources to Support Social Wellbeing” and that is for the first time organised by Portugal. MUM over the years has been involved in the Executive Board (EB) of WFCC making significant contributions to the progress of the state-of-the-art long-term management of microbial preservation. Currently, the MUM Quality Manager is a member of the EB.

As President of the Local Organised Committee, prof. Nelson Lima invites everybody to save the dates 12-16 June on his agenda and wishes that their participation and contributions will enrich the scientific programme that will be available soon.