100 Years of collecting biological materials: The diversity of the ATCC collection and its use as biological standards

For more than 100 years, ATCC® has been supplying the global scientific community with authenticated, high-quality biological resources and standards that support research with the power to transform lives. At its inception in the 1920s, ATCC® was regarded as simply a microbial culture collection—a repository of microorganisms that scientists could draw from to conduct their research to make new discoveries. Today, ATCC® provides the world’s leading scientists with one of the largest and most diverse collection of biological materials, including microbes, cell lines, molecular genomics tools, and nucleic acids. ATCC® also serves as both a type strain and patent depository. Our vast collection boasts more than 70,000 microbes and 4,000 eukaryotic cell lines used in various industrial applications, and we are continuing to expand. In this poster, I will highlight the diversity and importance of the collection built over the last 100 years. I will describe the whole cell and molecular standards developed from our collection that support drug discovery, food, clinical and diagnostic labs. The collection and derived products can be used as a valuable resource for the present and future generations of scientists.