ИСТИНА

The history of biodiversity studies accounts for many centuries. Meanwhile, many discoveries have been made, and nowadays, it is possible to state that we know something about principles of the life organization on different levels. However, the major trend of life sciences in 20th century has been concentration on the individual objects studies (e.g. morphology and ecology of species, molecular mechanisms of intracellular processes, DNA sequencing etc). On the other hand, at present it is clear that comparative approach (i.e. simultaneous analysis of several objects with subsequent integration of obtained data and search for common principles) is much more efficient that individual studies of one single object. Comparative biology allows obtaining results that are principally unobtainable when working with single objects. Moreover, more objects are involved in comparative analysis, more valuable results are obtained from this analysis. To simplify access to biological objects for researchers, these objects should be organized in large repositories. Thus, biological collections take on greater and greater importance for life sciences as they make possible fact and easy search of desired objects for further comparative analysis. Today, a plethora of biological collections exist all-over-the-world, containing different types of objects stored in different manners. Unfortunately, many of them do not meet modern requirements for basic parts of comparative biological studies. Different collections are organized in different manners and are not presented in a sole virtual space. To solve these issues, “Noah’s Ark” project has been launched in Moscow University (MU). During almost 4 years of its execution, all large biological collections of MU have been revised and identically formatted. Moreover, the informational system of the project has been developed. At present, it contains data about more than million units of different MU collections (from Herbarium to frozen human cells collections). This system should be regarded as the prototype of the whole-Russia (or even worldwide) biocollections virtual space. Launching the informational system has substantially increased the level of life science research in MU, and we hope that the similar effect can be reached nationwide in the future.