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Our thirty years of research at Vivekananda Institute of Tropical Mycology (VINSTROM) on fungal endophytes of terrestrial and aquatic plants have yielded many interesting insights into this ecological group of fungi, a constituent of the plant microbiome. Having pioneered the study of fungal endophytes in India, we have established a culture collection of these fungi in VINSTROM. It now has about 1700 fungal endophyte isolates obtained from plants of different ecosystems in different parts of India. Endophytes produce an extraordinary array of bioactive compounds, novel industrial enzymes and enhance the fitness of the plants they colonize by elevating their tolerance to abiotic and biotic stressors. Considering such desirable traits of fungal endophytes, VINSTROM's culture collection is a unique repository that needs to be explored for the technological use of endophytes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Culture collections are valuable resources for the sustainable use of microbial diversity and its conservation. Advances in biotechnology have further increased their importance and some of these have been recognized as International Depositary Authority (IDA) for the deposition of patent cultures. Microbial Culture Collection at National Centre for Cell Science was established by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India is country's newest culture collection with largest holdings. It is recognized as an IDA under the Budapest Treaty and Designated National Repository under the Biodiversity Act 2002. This article describes its various service related activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this study was to analyze marine cyanobacterial culture collections strains of the Indian subcontinent at the level below species. This is important to improve the abilities of service culture collections to provide their user community with correctly identified and clean organisms. A total of 50 marine cyanobacterial strains were genotyped with M13 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) fingerprinting to provide diagnostic fingerprints for each culture. Depending on the strains, 9 to 26 bands were observed for the primer tested. Within the species, strains representing different isolates were genetically clearly different. Data obtained from genomic fingerprinting were used to construct binary distance matrix, and the neighbor-joining tree constructed demonstrated the ability of this method to differentiate strains at the intraspecific level. An important and useful result obtained in this study is the application of the M13 PCR fingerprinting method on almost all forms of cyanobacteria for strain and species discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]