The consortium comprises more than 269,000 publicly available strains of bacteria including mycobacteria and cyanobacteria, filamentous fungi, yeasts, diatoms and plasmids.

BCCM is embedded in international initiatives such as the World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC) and operates in compliance with the rules of the Nagoya Protocol.

In 2011, 3 additional dedicated collections were included in the BCCM consortium: Micro-organisms are an important raw material in biotechnology.

Consider, for example, fermentation processes and the use of probiotics in foods, the production of antibiotics in medicine, the use of microorganisms as growth promoting elements in agriculture, as bioremediators on polluted sites, etc.

The BCCM contributes to the innovation process by accepting and storing deposits of the biological materials referred to in patent applications.