CABI teams up with Royal Holloway and the British Antarctic Survey (BAS)
Ezine, January 2008
For over 80 years CABI has been collecting microorganisms from around the world and two new partnerships formed in 2007 will help us explore their potential and increase the chances of discovering new antibiotics, vitamins or new sources of enzymes - an increasingly important issue due to increased appearance of multiple-resistant bacterial infections.
In an exciting new venture, we have taken the British Antarctic Survey’s microbial collection into our care, adding to our own collection of over 28,000 live and 400,000 dried organisms.
Due to the virtually uncharted territory where they were collected the strains are likely to be highly unique.
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Penicillium expansum
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We now also have the added opportunity to explore our collection in innovative ways due to our partnership with Royal Holloway. Bringing together a combination of individual scientific skills, expertise and resources, this partnership will allow us to analyse strains from our collection in a combination of ways. This facility will be a highly focused natural products drug discovery operation addressing the urgent need for bringing new antibiotic compounds to market.
Screening the collection
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These two new alliances add to our pre-existing partnerships with PharmaLinks and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
All four partnerships will no doubt increase the chances of finding valuable new and useful molecules for natural product discovery and having screened the first 50 cultures through external partners, the results are looking very promising.
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