A Wealth of New Information Driven By a Powerful Search Facility - the National Collection of Type Cultures: ECACC's New Website
15 November 2007
September 2007 saw the launch of a new NCTC website, which provides easy access to over 5000 reference bacterial cultures, 100 mycoplasmas and more than 500 plasmids, host strains, bacteriophages and transposons. All of these are of medical, scientific and veterinary importance. In addition, the website offers valuable comprehensive resources to customers wishing to search for specific bacterial cultures, their characteristics and DNA sequences together with frequently asked questions, technical support and significant bibliographies. Polyphasic identifications can be performed and nomenclature reviewed.
Additional features to the site include an advanced online ordering facility, incorporating an ability to create a personal profile to view the history of previous orders. "This new website will further strengthen the availability of our strains to our customers and provide insight into the identification of new species," states Dr Barry Holmes, Head of NCTC.
"The website will be regularly updated with new bacterial strains and news from the NCTC. This will allow customers to easily access specific information or alternatively gain a general understanding of what NCTC can offer," explains Dr Elizabeth Fashola-Stone, project manager, marketing.
NCTC was established in 1920 and is the oldest collection of bacterial cultures in the world to offer a supply service. This continues as its prime function today, supplying reference bacterial cultures worldwide to support academic, health, food, veterinary institutes and commercial organisations.
In addition to supplying bacterial cultures, NCTC also provides a range of associated services, which includes:
- Freeze-drying of customer-provided strains
- International Depository Authority (IDA) patent depository for bacterial cultures
- Production of cultures and samples for use in European Quality Assurance (EQA) schemes
- Provision of cultures (in LENTICULE disc format) with defined numbers of cfu/disc
The NCTC is one of the Health Protection Agency Culture Collections together with:
- European Collection of Cell Cultures (ECACC)
- National Collection of Pathogenic Fungi (NCPF)
- National Collection of Pathogenic Viruses (NCPV)
The Health Protection Agency Culture Collections are a strategic business unit within the Health Protection Agency.
