Aberdeen-based microbiology, analytical services, and biological material storage company NCIMB recently marked a significant anniversary.

Seventy years ago, on the 1^st of July 1950, the creation of a National Collection of Industrial Bacteria was announced in the journal Nature. The collection took over the non-pathogenic cultures held by the UK’s National Collection of Type Cultures and was reported to be giving “particular emphasis” to assay organisms.  This collection went on to merge with the National Collections of Marine and then Food bacteria to create the culture collection that NCIMB Ltd curates today – the National Collection of Industrial, Food and Marine Bacteria.

It sounds like an eclectic mix, but the name is now more of a reflection of our history than a description of what our culture collection currently includes.

Back in 1950, it was reported that the culture collection, which “housed some 350 types”, would become more representative of the needs of industry by obtaining cultures from other laboratories in Great Britain and abroad. The collection has certainly grown, and now includes thousands of strains isolated by scientists around the world, from all kinds of environments. This includes not only marine environments and foodstuffs, but also soil and freshwater, as well as the extreme environments that can be a particularly rich source of industrially useful enzymes. Recent additions to the collection have even included several novel species of human gut bacteria.

So seventy years on, our culture collection is still growing and developing in order to provide a vital service for researchers and industry – maintaining a genetic resource for the future as well as supplying the cultures that are needed today for research projects and routine testing.

And although, the culture collection is now just one element of NCIMB Ltd, which has grown to offer a range of services including next generation sequencing, bioinformatics, microbial identification and storage, this unique resource will always be at the heart of our organisation.

Learn more about the culture collection at www.ncimb.com.