Microbial Culture Collection of National Biological Resources Bank

Microbial Culture Collection of National Biological Resources Bank

Sinil Kim, Jae Eun So, Hye yoon Park and Soonok Kim

Biological Resources Utilization Division, National Institute of Biological Resources, Korea

National Institute of Biological Resources (NIBR) of the Ministry of Environment runs the National Biological Resources Bank for sustainable preservation and management of indigenous wildlife resources. This bank encompasses 4 types of resources including genetic resources such as tissues and DNA, natural products, microbial culture, and wild plant seeds, providing research materials to academia, research institutes, or industry sectors. The Microbial Culture Collection of NIBR maintains over 23,000 strains of prokaryotes, fungi, and microalgae as of June 2023. Among them, 10,342 are fungal strains of 1,077 species isolated from diverse materials and locations across the country. Phylum Ascomycota constituted about 78.3% with 8,103 strains of 752 species followed by phylum Basidiomycota with 1,657 strains of 269 species. Fungal strains in other phyla such as Zygomycota, Neocallimastigomycota, and Glomeromycota, etc. are under represented. About 68% (3,468 strains) of the 5,119 strains with information of origination from which these are isolated were from any materials such as plants or animals, while 32% (1,651 strains) were from environmental samples such as soil, water or air. About 17% are Ascomycetous or Basidiomycetous yeasts with about 100 Saccharomyces cerevisiae strains 6 of which were commercialized as novel starter strains in brewing industry. These microbial strains are distributed free of charge upon request through ‘Species of Korea’ website, https://species.nibr.go.kr.