Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen

Nearly 200 scientists and technical staff currently work at the DSMZ.[7] It is a company/non-profit organization recognized as a public benefit.[8] In 2018, the Leibniz Institute DSMZ was recognized as the world's first registered collection under Directive (European Union) 511/2014, providing all users with the necessary legal certainty in the handling of their bioresources in accordance with the so-called Nagoya Protocol.[9][10] The DSMZ is a partner in international organizations such as the European Culture Collections' Organisation (ECCO), the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF).[11]

DSMZ is a global service provider with more than 10,000 customers in over 80 countries and provides microorganisms and cell cultures for university, non-university and industrial research in the life sciences. It also serves as a patent and security depository for biological material (a total of over 11,700 bioresources) in accordance with the guidelines of the Budapest Treaty.[12] It is the only patent depository for bioresources in Germany.[13] The DSMZ only holds bioresources in biosafety level 1 and 2.

In 2012, the freely accessible database BacDive (The Bacterial Diversity Metadatabase)[14] was established, which is maintained and curated by the DSMZ. The database contains information on a wide variety of strains of prokaryotes; in 2016, information on 53,978 strains could be found there,[15] and by 2021, the number had increased to more than 82,000.[16]

In addition to the research departments Microbial Ecology and Diversity Research [17] and Microbial Genome Research,[18] the eight departments of the DSMZ include the collection departments Microorganisms,[19] Bioresources for Bioeconomy and Health Research,[20] Human and Animal Cell Lines[21] and Plant Viruses [22] as well as the departments Services [23] and Bioinformatics and Databases.[24] The establishment of independent junior research groups (as of 2021: VirusInteract (interactions of plant viruses with their hosts) and Microbial Biotechnology) provides qualification opportunities for young scientists conducting research on selected, current topics.