But such collections are present,

today, almost exclusively in developed countries only. Many historical questions that should have been monitored decades before for the sources, transport and accumulation of the thousands of anthropogenic chemicals can be studied at present and also in the future, as they are now in store at about 20 environmental specimen banks spread all over the world. Thousands of new chemicals are coming into existence with increasing usage in agriculture, industries, etc. With the emergence of several such potentially hazardous contaminants, the need for determining past exposure patterns and temporal and find more spatial trends will become an absolute necessity in future. The first ever specimen bank was established in Sweden in the 1960s and since then this practice has made progress such that many specialized banks have been established in different countries. Now there are banks storing samples both from abiotic environment such as air, water, soil and sediment as well as biological samples obtained from human, animals and plants. There are now 19 well established specimen banks located in 13 countries (Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Africa, Spain,

Sweden, U.K. selleck compound and U.S.A.) representing five continents (Becker and Wise, 2010), but almost all of them are developed nations, except Brazil and South Africa. While many of those specimen banks archive either specific samples (e.g. human tissues, marine mammals) or samples from specific locations (marine, coastal)

and countries, some are archiving variety of samples from all over the world (e.g. es-BANK at Ehime University, Japan) (Tanabe, 2006). Historically, the primary reason for archiving samples was to provide materials for analyzing trends of previously unrecognized pollutants in environmental and biological matrices, or for determining pollutants of contemporary interest for which analytical techniques were unavailable during the time of collection. Recently, the specimens from such banks have also been used for studying some of the biological parameters of rare and critically endangered Ponatinib species. The results obtained from the specimen bank samples have brought to light many interesting temporal and spatial trends of pollutants (Braune, 2007, Tanabe, 2007, Tanabe and Minh, 2010 and Tanabe et al., 2008). If such findings have to be continued in future, as they should, then establishing new specimen banks, and maintenance and upgrading existing specimen banks, is badly needed. It is well known that pollution by any chemical, either persistent or non-persistent, is never local or regional but is always global. So, when it comes to the question of archiving specimens, it should be always done on a global scale, especially in the case of biological specimens.