National Collection of Plant Pathogenic Bacteria (NCPPB)
The Collection exists primarily to preserve and maintain, for use by research and educational establishments, and by industry, cultures of the world's bacterial plant pathogens. It is intended that sufficient cultures shall be kept of each species to be representative of its geographic and host range, and of the variation within it.
Introduction
The NCPPB is one of the longest established collections of its type anywhere in the world and a founder collection of the United Kingdom Biological Resource Centre Network (UKBRCN).
We are one of the most widely utilised collections for the supply and deposition of reference, type, and pathotype strains of plant pathogenic bacteria, and aim to keep representatives of all known culturable bacterial plant pathogens.
What we do
Lyophilisation, or freeze-drying, is the preferred method of culture maintenance due to the extended shelf life of the product and security from contamination. Cultures are sealed in glass vials under vacuum to form ampoules. Each batch of ampoules is checked for its purity, authenticity and viability immediately after lyophilisation.
Our authenticity checks incorporate fatty acid profiling, partial and whole gene sequencing, and MALDI-TOF MS analysis based on our own bacterial plant pathogen library.
- Catalogue A catalogue of all strains in the NCPPB is accessed by visiting the website.
- Deposition The NCPPB accepts, free of charge, reference strains of newly described plant pathogenic bacterial taxa. We also accept strains of high interest, including those that support research publishing, new pathovars and sub-species, and other strains that extend the geographical and host ranges of the taxa, subject to the Curator’s discretion.
- Culture sales Bacterial strains are available for purchase as lyophilized (freeze-dried) ampoules, on growth media slopes, or suspended at specific concentrations. We can also provide various DNA extracts for all our strains. The price list is also available on the website.
History
In 1947 the National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) made the decision to divest itself of all bacterial strains that were not of medical importance, and it was decided that all the bacterial plant pathogens, some dating back to the early 1900s, should be donated to the collection maintained by W. J. Dowson at the Botany School, Cambridge, on behalf of the Agricultural Research Council.
In 1956 the collection of 200 isolates moved to the Plant Pathology Laboratory (PPL) of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries & Food (MAFF) and in that year was recognised as a National Collection by the Permanent Committee of the Commonwealth Collection of Micro-organisms. The PPL is now part of Fera Science Ltd and Defra replaced MAFF in 2001. The collection is still owned by Defra, is operated under licence by Fera, and currently houses around 4000 strains.
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