A microorganism, or microbe, is an organism of microscopic size, which may exist in its single-celled form or as a colony of cells.
The National Chemical Laboratory (NCL) is an Indian government laboratory based in Pune, in western India.
A microbiological culture, or microbial culture, is a method of multiplying microbial organisms by letting them reproduce in predetermined culture medium under controlled laboratory conditions. Microbial cultures are foundational and basic diagnostic methods used as a research tools in molecular biology.
Metagenomics is the study of genetic material recovered directly from environmental or clinical samples by a method called sequencing. The broad field may also be referred to as environmental genomics, ecogenomics, community genomics or microbiomics.
The Budapest Treaty on the International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the Purposes of Patent Procedure, or Budapest Treaty, is an international treaty signed in Budapest, Hungary, on April 28, 1977. It entered into force on August 19, 1980, and was later amended on September 26, 1980. The treaty is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
ATCC or the American Type Culture Collection is a nonprofit organization which collects, stores, and distributes standard reference microorganisms, cell lines and other materials for research and development. Established in 1925 to serve as a national center for depositing and distributing microbiological specimens, ATCC has since grown to distribute in over 150 countries. It is now the largest general culture collection in the world.
The World Federation for Culture Collections is an international body formed under the umbrella of the International Union of Biological Sciences and a Federation within the International Union of Microbiological Societies. The WFCC operates as a clearing house for information on collections of microbiological specimens. It supports the development, maintenance and establishment of culture collections. The WFCC bylaws were published in 1972 in the International Journal of Systematic Biology and updated several times since.
The Institute of Microbial Technology (IMTECH), based in Chandigarh, India, is one of the constituent establishments of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research (CSIR). It was established in 1984.
The International Society for Microbial Ecology (ISME) is the principal scientific society for the burgeoning field of microbial ecology and its related disciplines. ISME is a non-profit association and is owner of the International Symposia on Microbial Ecology and also owner of The ISME Journal which is published by Springer Nature. The ISME Office is based at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology in Wageningen, The Netherlands.
Microbiota are the range of microorganisms that may be commensal, mutualistic, or pathogenic found in and on all multicellular organisms, including plants. Microbiota include bacteria, archaea, protists, fungi, and viruses, and have been found to be crucial for immunologic, hormonal, and metabolic homeostasis of their host.
The Leibniz Institute DSMZ - German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures GmbH, located in Braunschweig, is a research infrastructure in the Leibniz Association. Also the DSMZ is the world's most diverse collection of bioresources. These include microorganisms as well as more than 840 human and animal cell cultures, over 1. 500 plant viruses, over 940 bacteriophages, and 250 plasmids. Since 2010, the scientific director of the Leibniz Institute DSMZ has been Jörg Overmann, a microbiologist with a PhD. He holds a professorship in microbiology at the Technical University of Braunschweig. Since August 2018, he has led the institute in a dual leadership with Bettina Fischer as administrative director.
Microbiology is the scientific study of microorganisms, those being of unicellular (single-celled), multicellular, or acellular. Microbiology encompasses numerous sub-disciplines including virology, bacteriology, protistology, mycology, immunology, and parasitology.
The Belgian Co-ordinated Collections of Micro-organisms (BCCM) is a Belgian government funded consortium of seven scientific institutions, who manage and exploit a collection of microbial and genetic resources. The consortium comprises more than 269,000 publicly available strains of bacteria including mycobacteria and cyanobacteria, filamentous fungi, yeasts, diatoms and plasmids.
The European Culture Collections' Organisation (ECCO) is a European non-profit organisation which promotes the collaboration and exchange of ideas and information on all aspects of culture collection activity. Corporate members of ECCO are microbial resource centres of countries with microbiological societies affiliated to the Federation of the European Microbiological Societies (FEMS).
The National Collection of Industrial Microorganisms (NCIM) is an Indian Government organized microbial culture repository located in NCL, Pune, in western India. It is basically a non-profit organization which serves as a repository for isolation, preservation and distribution of industrially important cultures based on scientifically published articles. It was established in the year 1951 and claims to be the oldest and biggest culture repository in India. Initially it started with 400 cultures, as of April 2010, NCIM maintains over 3700 non-pathogenic pure cultures.
NCIM is a member of World Federation for Culture Collections (WFCC) and has an online search-able database and strains.
A microbial consortium or microbial community, is two or more bacterial or microbial groups living symbiotically. Consortiums can be endosymbiotic or ectosymbiotic, or occasionally may be both. The protist Mixotricha paradoxa, itself an endosymbiont of the Mastotermes darwiniensis termite, is always found as a consortium of at least one endosymbiotic coccus, multiple ectosymbiotic species of flagellate or ciliate bacteria, and at least one species of helical Treponema bacteria that forms the basis of Mixotricha protists' locomotion.
A fastidious organism is any organism that has complex or particular nutritional requirements. In other words, a fastidious organism will only grow when specific nutrients are included in its medium. The more restrictive term fastidious microorganism is used in microbiology to describe microorganisms that will grow only if special nutrients are present in their culture medium. Thus fastidiousness is often practically defined as being difficult to culture, by any method yet tried.
A microbiome is the community of microorganisms that can usually be found living together in any given habitat. It was defined more precisely in 1988 by Whipps et al. as "a characteristic microbial community occupying a reasonably well-defined habitat which has distinct physio-chemical properties. The term thus not only refers to the microorganisms involved but also encompasses their theatre of activity". In 2020, an international panel of experts published the outcome of their discussions on the definition of the microbiome. They proposed a definition of the microbiome based on a revival of the "compact, clear, and comprehensive description of the term" as originally provided by Whipps et al., but supplemented with two explanatory paragraphs. The first explanatory paragraph pronounces the dynamic character of the microbiome, and the second explanatory paragraph clearly separates the term microbiota from the term microbiome.
The National Collection of Industrial, Food and Marine Bacteria (NCIMB) is a culture collection in the United Kingdom consisting of microorganisms from environmental samples as well as bacteria involved in the production or spoilage of food and drink, and bacteria with important industrial properties. It is a large reference collection and has over 10,000 deposits. Deposits to the collection can be made for research purposes, or for inclusion into patent submissions.
