Soils are the principal reservoirs of microbial diversity and represent a core component of terrestrial ecosystems. There is an increasing demand for assessing the impact of agricultural and industrial practices on the environment at large scales in a context of global change. To address this demand, taxonomic and functional diversity of soil microbial communities, and their stability over time need to be characterized for predicting soil quality upon human activities, the evolution of this quality being expected to affect environment quality and public health. Recent methodological progresses have led to the development and automation of molecular biological tools (based on the extraction and characterization of nucleic acids) which can be applied, with moderate throughput, to characterize soil microbial genetic resources (taxonomic diversity and functional potential). These tools should now be applied systematically to large-scale samples so as to extend their general usefulness and produce a reliable reference system for the characterization and interpretation of the soil microbial diversity. In this context, the platform GenoSol was created in 2008 by the Research Unit of INRA (National Institute for Agronomic Research) Microbiology of the Soil and Environment at Dijon (France). The aim of this platform is to provide an appropriate logistic structure for the acquisition, storage and characterization of soil genetic resources obtained by extensive sampling (several hundred to several thousand soils), on very large space and/or time scales (network of national soil survey, long-term experimental sites, . . .), and to make these resources readily available for the whole scientific community and policy makers. The ultimate goal is to produce a reliable reference system based on molecular characterization (taxonomic and functional features) of the soil microbial communities that provide scientific interpretations of the analyses from large scales of time and space sampling. The platform also aims at building up and storing for long-term periods a library of soil genetic resources that is made available to national and international scientific communities.