Special issue on Algal Culture collections in the –omics age
Extracts from the Special Issue Editorial, written by the Guest Editors
Algal culture collections act as specified resource centres and international depositories for cyanobacteria and eukaryotic algae. They underpin and actively contribute to research, teaching and biotechnology with well-defined reference strains, associated data and broad expertise in isolation, identification and ex situ conservation. In this way, they are adding value to known and as yet unknown algal biodiversity, and contributing to the growth of the bioeconomy and bioscience by helping to exploit novel sources.
On 27th and 28 August 2019, curators from 28 public algal culture collections in USA, Canada, Japan, Australia, China, Malaysia, Norway, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Czech Republic, Poland, Algeria, Israel, Russia, Croatia, Chile and the UK got together and discussed common challenges. These included talks on: how we can sustain collections’ funding in the decades ahead; new applications, for example seaweed bio-banking, and widening the biodiversity to include entities such as aquatic viruses; maintenance and cryopreservation methods; genome sequencing projects; collections as an educational resource; the Nagoya Protocol; and Quality Assurance.
The introduction of omics technologies, the rapid expansion of molecular toolboxes for (new) model organisms and increasingly non-model organisms, and the surge in biotechnological research, inspire algal culture collections to respond to these developments and expand their activities. Today they are vital for many areas of phycological research.
We were delighted to be invited by the Managing Editors of this new Applied Phycology journal, Professors Juliet Brodie and Christine Maggs, to launch the journal with a “special edition” based on the talks at the Collection meeting.
Edited by
Christine N. Campbell(Scottish Association for Marine Science, Scottish Marine Institute, Oban, UK)
Maike Lorenz(Culture Collection of Algae at Göttingen University (SAG), Georg-August-University Göttingen, Göttingen, Germa)