It has been a slow time in many respects as we live through the Covid-19 pandemic, however, CCAP has been moving along in several new directions.

In February 2021 our new website was launched. Rachel Saxon, our CCAP administrator is our webmaster and we have bright new branding, by SAMS designer Iona Harvey. The site is fully responsive, can be accessed by all mobile devices, and has a new easy to use shop https://www.ccap.ac.uk . Also accessible is our unique new CCAP Bioinformatics Gateway https://www.ccap.ac.uk/ccaptools . Last year CCAP took advantage of the opportunity for additional funding from NERC and employed Fred De Boever, fresh from gaining his PhD, with former supervisor, Dr David Green, to design a new tool providing easy access to CCAP sequence data. There is a central platform allowing users to browse and access CCAP sequences, meta-data and results – view taxonomy, phylogenetic trees, or BLAST a sequence against CCAP database. Please visit the site and try out this very clever tool.

In the Gateway, the trees are using single gene barcodes to build the trees, however, increasingly we are able to sequence the entire genome of our strains. In CCAP we have been delighted to have contributed strains and their DNA to several genome projects: The Chinese 10KP https://db.cngb.org/10kp/ ; a Microcystin genome project; a SAMS cyanobacterial microbiome project; for a commercial seaweed project; and we have submitted the first strains to the protist section of the Darwin Tree of Life Project https://www.darwintreeoflife.org/

A core deliverable for CCAP is to deliver training to the users of our facility. This year our usual face to face training was not possible, so we instead offered an online training course. Over two and a half days in late February the CCAP team and associated SAMS staff offered short lectures on a wide range of algal topics, video demonstrations and Q&A sessions. A total of 60 international participants ranging from students to biotech professionals joined us and we plan to provide access to some of the key training videos via our website. We are grateful to the British Phycological Society  and  Algae-UK for funding support for our course.

The CCAP team have been developing a quality assurance management system to cover our core activities over the last 5 years: writing SOPs, designing standard forms, keeping more transparent records. All agree that this has not been over burdensome and has improved our efficiency and performance. Following a remote audit on the 1^st March, our quality assurance management system has been approved for ISO 9001:2015 accreditation.

CCAP ARIES Facility

In the middle of the lockdown we were successful in obtaining over £500K from NERC Services and Facilities capital funding to develop a new facility - CCAP-ARIES: Algae Research, Innovation and Environmental Science Centre. Due to be open in the summer of 2021, CCAP will offer a service to grow and harvest up to 300 litres of culture and analyse samples using metabolomics and genetic methods. We would welcome enquires from researchers in the proposal writing stage and from algal biotechnology companies.

Finally, as you read this I will have retired from my post having worked with CCAP for almost 35 years, however, I leave the Collection in the expert hands of Ceci Rad Menéndez and the very capable team. I hope to retain an active interest in all things phycological and will be contactable at my SAMS email address. Please keep in touch!

 

Christine Campbell MBE

christine.campbell@sams.ac.uk