By Musliyana Mansor, Nor Umaira Abu Asan, Geok Hun Tan

Microbial Culture Collection Unit (UNiCC), Institute of Bioscience, Universiti Putra Malaysia, 43400 UPM Serdang, Selangor D.E., Malaysia

Microbial culture collections are function as depositories for microorganism and as libraries that holding data on microbial materials. Besides that, they are also providing other services such as supply, preservation and identification of microorganisms, and also providing training and consultancy on the related fields. According to World Federation of Culture Collections’ guidelines (2010), in order to minimize the probability of cultures being lost during depositories, at least two different methods of maintenances should be applied for each strain.

There are three types of depository carried out by culture collections or bioresource centres:  

(i) Public deposit: culture collections are usually providing free of charge service for this type of deposit. In order to be considered and accepted to this service, depositor is acquired to fill in accession form and provide these data: (a) information of strain; (b) risk assessment of strain; (c) historical (e.g source of isolation, country of origin); (d) information about special features, properties or application; (e) literature; (f) sequence data. Depositor shall agree to culture collections’ conditions and policy, or Material Deposit Agreement (MDA). Depositor shall agree to allow culture collections to distribute, sell or supply cultures to third party under the general conditions of Material Transfer Agreement (MTA). Data of strains from this deposit will be published in catalogue (online or hardcopy) in order to make it accessible to scientific community.

 (ii) Safe deposit: fee is applied for this deposit. All information related to the strain and depositor are remained strictly confidential and not publicly shared. Strain will not be distributed unless with an official permission from depositor.

(iii) Patent deposit: a culture collection has to be an international depositary authority as required by the Budapest Treaty on the international recognition of the deposit of microorganisms for the purposes of patent procedure. Patented microorganism is accepted, preserved, and stored with fee. All information related to the strain and depositor are remained strictly confidential and not publicly shared.

Currently there are culture collections that offer public and/or safe deposit services to researcher in Malaysia such as Microbial Culture Collection Unit (UNiCC), Institute of Bioscience in Universiti Putra Malaysia. However, there are no culture collections that offer patent deposit just yet.

Tarikh Input: 08/02/2021 | Kemaskini: 18/04/2021 | mfareeq