The National Aquatic Biological Resource Center was approved to be established by the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Ministry of Finance as one of the 30 national biological germplasm and experimental material resource banks. Institute of Hydrobiology (IHB) of Chinese Academy of Sciences led the construction of the resource center.    

The resource center has been built into a domestic leading and world-class resource center of aquatic experimental organisms, consisting of the China Zebrafish Resource Center, freshwater algae culture collection, Tetrahymena Functional Genomics Database. It has also built the largest resource center of the major freshwater aquaculture fishes, such as the crucian carps and grass carps, and boasts the world’s largest resource center of duckweed and the world’s only captive breeding of the Yangtze finless porpoises.    

IHB will further support the management of the resource center and formulate a five-year plan for the construction and operation of the national platform; sort out the framework of the S&T resources in this field and integrate the S&T resources in related fields to the national platforms; strengthen the development, application, analysis and utilization of the S&T resources and improve the utilization efficiency of the S&T resources; improve the infrastructure construction needed for the storing, management and safety of the S&T resources as well as the cybersecurity system.