The collection began as a research collection in the 1990s at the former Marine Biology Laboratory in Trieste, thanks to the efforts of Dr Alfred Beran, who started isolating strains from the Gulf of Trieste. Over time, more than one hundred strains of both autotrophic and heterotrophic protists were maintained. This collection, along with the former Laboratory, was then incorporated into the National Institute of Oceanography and Applied Geophysics – OGS. In the 2000s, CoSMi was officially established as an infrastructure maintained in the Oceanography Section of the OGS and became one of the few official Italian collections of marine microalgae, joining national and international networks of microorganism collections.

Since 2018, it has been part of MIRRI.IT (opens in new tab) (Italian Microbial Resource Research Infrastructure), which is included in the European MIRRI-ERIC (opens in new tab) infrastructure and brings together all Italian culture collections and microbial biological resource centres. Its aim is to coordinate and support the operation of Italian collections in accordance with international quality standards. Furthermore, since 2021, it has been part of the World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC (opens in new tab)) and since 2023 of the European Culture Collection Organisation (ECCO (opens in new tab)).

CoSMi is one of the Operative Units of the project SUS-MIRRI.IT (opens in new tab) (2022-2026) funded by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) to increase the bioresources stored at MIRRI-IT Research Infrastructures.