E-Portfolio Microbiology II Week 7

On 30^th April 2018, a group of students from Bachelor of Microbiology has visited Institute of Bioscience, UPM. The purpose of us visiting IBS was to learn more on culture collection as IBS actually provided services on culture collection from all around Malaysia. This services were put under the Microbial Culture Collection Unit or also known as UNiCC where samples from different states in Malaysia were kept and preserved.

At 2.50pm, all of the students supervised by Mr. Syazwan and Miss Aina were gathered at Bilik Tongkat Ali Emas for short briefing from Pn. Musliyana Mansur, officer who was in charge of UNiCC. Basically, UNiCC was established on 2008 after the opening of IBS at 1996 where all the researches sample are preserved. UNiCC was initiated in to maintain and manage a duplicate of available microbial strains in UPM. UNiCC also aspires to provide strains for researcher and teaching laboratories. The objectives of UNiCC are to establish and maintain a microbial culture collection center using a standard system, to provide safe deposition of microbial cultures for Malaysian researchers and industries and also to stimulate and support the study and research work related to microbial diversity and taxonomy in UPM.

From the current data, UNiCC had about 1300 of total microbial cultures been deposited with 350 cultures ready to be identified. These cultures are mainly from Malaysian researches and also there are samples from overseas that includes Japan and Thailand. The sample from UPM itself are mainly from Faculty of Food Technology and Faculty of Biotechnology and Molecular Sciences. Both of the faculties provide more than half of the cultures sample generally from Malaysia.

The funding for UNiCC are from 9^th Malaysia Plan around the year of 2008 to 2010 where most of the funding includes equipment for the unit. This unit is also funded by Edu Park, UPM that includes chemical substances, laboratory materials and equipment. There is also some initiatives that this unit does in order for them to be self-funded. UNiCC also have been collaborated with some of renowned culture collection centre like The National Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (BIOTEC) of Thailand and also the World Federation for Culture Collections. These collaborations help them to be recognize as international-level of culture collection centre. However, Malaysia is way behind those countries like Thailand and Japan as the available equipment can only support limited sample from all over Malaysia.

Generally, UNiCC provides Safe Depository services. It is a service for researchers who want to maintain important strains under a proper culture collection management system. Most groups of bacteria, fungi and yeasts that are classified in Hazard Group 1 or 2 are accepted. The service is completely confidential and recall or distribution of cultures is carried out strictly according to the instructions of the client. Viability testing of safe deposit cultures after prolonged storage will only be performed upon depositor's requests.

Here in IBS, UNiCC has separate laboratory for Bacteria and Fungi with the equipment of freezer, freeze-dryer and chiller to keep the cultural samples. Safe Depository will be charged with some service charges and the Public Depository services is free of any charges as the sample can be distributed to other researches with proper procedures.

Then, we were taken to the laboratory area and the keeping are where all the cultures were collected, properly labelled and kept in certain temperature. The staffs were so friendly during our visits. This visit really teach me a lot on how culture collections is so important and why is these centre are crucial for future purposes. There will be some pictures attached below from our visits to UNiCC.