Microbial Culture Collection
Culture collections are at the very heart of efforts to conserve biological diversity. The primary aim is to preserve their strain holdings while providing pure cultures and genetic material required for biotechnology application, teaching, research and other purposes. Since, their major task is to collect, preserve and make microbial strains accessible to the public.
Kinds of Culture Collections
Culture collections may be classified into three categories based on their specialities a and functions.
i) Private Culture Collections
Usually maintained by individual laboratories, institutes, hospitals and commercial firms. The number of holdings may range from small to large. Some collections are comparable to a public collection for example, research institutes in some private companies hold more than 20,000 cultures. The strains in private culture collections are usually not open to public.
ii) Specialized Collections
More often arises in the course of taxonomic study on a specific group of microorganism in specialized fields such as brewing, production of antibiotics, plant pathology and others, when a considerable amount of strains have been isolated.
iii) Public Collections
Consist of a large number of strains, and is established for the purpose of public service. The number of taxa varies from collection to collection
Example: The Central Bureau for Schimmel Cultures(CBS) in Netherlands maintains over 8000 species consisting of 18,000 strains of fungi.
Importance of Microbial Culture Collection
- Isolation and identification of microorganisms from various environmental niches.
- Preservation of microbial diversity from niche areas as meta genomic libraries.
- Development of new strategies for isolation of 'not yet cultured' microbes.
- To provide consultation services for patent deposits, preservation propagation, bio deterioration, industrial problems and microbial diversity issues etc.
- To serve as national facility for microbial culture collection deposit and the supply of authentic microbial cultures.