The SciCrunch portals now contain a data source that will help people figure out if their cell lines have been reported to be contaminated and the Resource Identification Portal at scicrunch will start asking authors to check this source at the time of publication.

Members of the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC) have been working with ExPASy on Cellosaurus, a comprehensive data registry for cell lines and cell line information. Cellosaurus assigns a cell line identifier to each cell line, cross links these identifiers to products available at any of the ~20 cell lines stock centers which make them available and adds notes where concerns have been raised about a cell line.

NIH has recently announced a set of reproducibility principles that target cell line authentication as an important part of research reproducibility and expect that most grants, starting in May 2016, will include a new attachment that explains the authentication of key biological resources, including cell lines.

For these reasons, we are proud to announce that Resource Identification Portal will now include Cellosaurus the core database of annotated cell lines and hope that authors begin to identify their cell lines by the RRID in the coming months, helping to keep track of this key biological resource.