ABRF (Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities)

ABRF (Association of Biomolecular Resource Facilities) is the membership professional association for people who operate, direct, staff, or otherwise support shared research core facilities and other biotechnology resource laboratories — it is not itself a core facility, a funder, or an accrediting body. Organized in 1988 and formally incorporated in Delaware in 1989, growing out of a 1986 gathering of protein-sequencing core operators at the Sixth International Conference on Methods in Protein Sequence Analysis, ABRF today counts more than 4,000 members representing 400+ member laboratories and administrative offices across government, academic, industrial, and commercial settings, per ABRF’s own current membership figures.

What Makes Something “ABRF” (Operational Definition)

ABRF membership and participation — not simply working in a core facility — is what distinguishes “the ABRF community” from the broader population of shared-resource staff generally. A person, laboratory, or activity counts as part of ABRF specifically when it involves:

• Individual or institutional membership in the association (voting laboratory-director membership and non-voting associate membership are both available).
• Participation in an ABRF Research Group — a member-run, technology-specific working group (see below) that designs and runs inter-laboratory studies.
• Attendance or presentation at the ABRF Annual Meeting, the association’s flagship spring conference.
• Publishing in, or citing, the Journal of Biomolecular Techniques (JBT), ABRF’s own peer-reviewed journal.

A core-facility director, technician, or administrator who has never joined ABRF or engaged with any of the above is still, correctly, a core-facility professional — just not part of this specific association. See CASRAI’s Core Facility (Research Core) guide for the underlying operational unit ABRF’s members typically run; this entry covers the professional association itself, not the facility type.

Programs and Activities

ABRF’s work is organized around a small number of recurring programs:

• Research Groups — member-organized, technology-specific communities (current areas include genomics, proteomics/metabolomics/mass spectrometry, flow cytometry, light microscopy, and immunohistochemistry) that design multi-site inter-laboratory studies. Participating labs contribute samples, run the same analysis, and compare results, so the group can gauge how well a given technique performs under real laboratory conditions and publish shared best-practice findings — ABRF describes Research Groups as the “heart and soul” of the organization.
• Annual Meeting — a yearly spring conference, rotating among North American cities, combining scientific presentations, hands-on workshops, an exhibit hall, and Research Group business meetings.
• Journal of Biomolecular Techniques (JBT) — ABRF’s peer-reviewed, open-access journal (ISSN 1524-0215), published quarterly plus a supplemental annual-meeting issue, indexed on PubMed Central. JBT publishes Research Group study results, technical reviews, and other biomolecular-resource-facility research.
• Regional chapters — geographic affiliates across North America (for example the Mid-Atlantic Directors and Staff of Scientific Cores, MADSSCi, and the South Central Core Collective, SC3) that run their own local meetings and networking between the annual national conference.
• Professional-development resources — a career center, a compensation survey used by many institutions to benchmark core-staff pay bands, mentoring programs, and webinars aimed specifically at core administrators and technical staff.

ABRF’s Role Among Core-Facility Professional Bodies

Within research administration, ABRF functions for core-facility staff and directors the way the Association of Clinical Research Professionals (ACRP) and the Society of Clinical Research Associates (SOCRA) function for clinical trial staff such as the Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC): a discipline-specific professional home that provides training, community, shared best-practice research, and a recognized conference for people doing a particular kind of specialized research-support work. That analogy is genuinely useful for orienting a research administrator unfamiliar with the core-facility side of research operations, but it has one important limit — see the next section.

What ABRF Is Not

Unlike ACRP (which administers the CCRC and CCRA credentialing exams) or SOCRA (which administers the CCRP credential) for clinical research staff, ABRF does not itself issue a formal individual professional certification or credential to core-facility staff. Its role is collective: inter-laboratory best-practice research, shared technical standards work through its Research Groups, publication, and community — not individual credentialing. A person who completes ABRF training, workshops, or Research Group participation is not thereby “ABRF-certified” in the way a clinical research coordinator can become a Certified Clinical Research Coordinator (CCRC). ABRF is also not a funding body (it does not itself fund core facilities — see CASRAI’s Core Facility guide for how NIH S10 grants and 2 CFR §200.468 recharge-rate rules actually fund and govern core operations), and it is not a single core facility or institution — it is the cross-institutional association its member facilities and staff belong to.

Related CASRAI Content

• Core Facility (Research Core) — the shared research-infrastructure unit ABRF’s members typically operate, including how core facilities are funded and governed.
• Clinical Research Coordinator (CRC) — an example of an adjacent research-operations role with its own dedicated professional/certifying bodies (ACRP, SOCRA), useful as a point of comparison for how ABRF’s model differs.