Focus on the German Environmental Specimen Bank

Article on the German Environmental Specimen Bank as a contemporary witness and motor of environmental monitoring at Wiley Analytical Science.

Since the 1980s, the German Government has supported environmental monitoring in Germany with the German Environmental Specimen Bank. Selected institutes collect, process and archive samples from inland waters and other environmental compartments at fixed intervals according to standardised and quality-assured procedures.

The biological and chemical integrity of the samples is preserved in the cryogenic archives. Experts can use modern methods to analyse them for known and new environmental problems that were not measurable, not investigated or completely unknown at the time of sampling. Element-, target- and non-target screening methods characterise complex mixtures of substances in the archive samples.

Environmental experts have begun to use effect-based and omics methods to investigate the effects of substance mixtures and their toxic drivers. In addition, new environmental DNA-based methods for archived samples are providing detailed insights into changes in biodiversity.