Relationship value benefits of membership programs, heterogeneous stakeholders and museum impact beyond fees

In times of decreasing public funding, cultural institutions such as museums increasingly develop new stakeholder management practices to build a different or more diversified support base. Recently, membership programs have especially been gaining popularity. In this paper, we adopt a relationship value approach to study the poorly understood behaviors of members that can benefit museums beyond membership fees. In particular, we focus on the extent to which membership level and the perceived prestige of the museum drive value co-creation through prestige leveraging. We study this by using a sample of 430 members and non-members of the Hermitage Museum in Amsterdam. We find that membership level is positively related with cross-buying behavior at the museum store and restaurant, and recommending the museum. In addition, these value creating behaviors are mediated by members leveraging the museum's prestige in their social environment. In contrast, we find a negative relationship between membership level and recruiting new members into the program, which could be explained by status dilution effects

MIBiG 3.0 : a community-driven effort to annotate experimentally validated biosynthetic gene clusters

With an ever-increasing amount of (meta)genomic data being deposited in sequence databases, (meta)genome mining for natural product biosynthetic pathways occupies a critical role in the discovery of novel pharmaceutical drugs, crop protection agents and biomaterials. The genes that encode these pathways are often organised into biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). In 2015, we defined the Minimum Information about a Biosynthetic Gene cluster (MIBiG): a standardised data format that describes the minimally required information to uniquely characterise a BGC. We simultaneously constructed an accompanying online database of BGCs, which has since been widely used by the community as a reference dataset for BGCs and was expanded to 2021 entries in 2019 (MIBiG 2.0). Here, we describe MIBiG 3.0, a database update comprising large-scale validation and re-annotation of existing entries and 661 new entries. Particular attention was paid to the annotation of compound structures and biological activities, as well as protein domain selectivities. Together, these new features keep the database up-to-date, and will provide new opportunities for the scientific community to use its freely available data, e.g. for the training of new machine learning models to predict sequence-structure-function relationships for diverse natural products. MIBiG 3.0 is accessible online at https://mibig.secondarymetabolites.org/