Dr Carol Phillips, CEO

When the National Collection of Industrial Bacteria was established in 1950, it was arguably a concept that was ahead of its time. The structure of DNA had not yet been discovered, and demand for petrochemicals would boom throughout the following decades. Fast forward 72 years however, and the transition to net zero is top of the agenda, with an urgent requirement to find alternatives to hydrocarbons – not only with respect to energy production, but also to produce so many raw materials and speciality chemicals that our way of life depends upon.

There have also been a lot of changes at NCIMB since 1950. We have grown as a culture collection – merging with the National Collections of Marine, and then Food Bacteria - and transitioned from a civil service organisation, into a limited company. In fact, 2022 marks the 40th anniversary of the formation of NCIMB limited - a company that is not only home to a precious genetic resource for the 21st century, but is also now an established provider of services and expertise required to support the biotechnology sector. We provide essential support for our customers developing new or improved microbial products and processes, as well as for companies working in sectors where proliferation of unwanted microbes can cause major headaches.

NCIMB Ltd.’s 40th anniversary is going to be an exciting year for the company. We will be moving to new bespoke premises, and I will be handing over the reins to a new CEO.

Looking back on my time at NCIMB, I am really proud of the way we have worked to develop services that support the biotech sector, helping companies develop and manufacture new products and processes, comply with regulations and safeguard their intellectual property.   One of the first services we offered industry was identification of microbial isolates - we can identify process contaminants, or isolates obtained in the course of environmental monitoring of cleanrooms. Today, we also undertake 16S metagenomics for microbial community analysis, and offer a qPCR service to help our customers detect and quantify microbes, with customised assays for organisms or functional genes of interest.

Whole genome sequencing can be particularly valuable for the biotech sector, not only as a starting point for assessing the suitability of strains for different applications, for example we have screened strains for antimicrobial resistance and virulence factors,  but also in monitoring for strain drift and with respect to intellectual property protection – a whole genome sequence can be key to resolving any intellectual property disputes as it is an unambiguous way of specifying the strain used within products or processes.

As a culture collection we are experts in the preservation and long-term storage of biological material, and so of course we offer our customers off-site storage for important research or production strains, as well as a patent deposit service for biological material that is the subject of patent applications.

In addition to providing services to the biotech industry, we have also worked collaboratively with other organisations in some really interesting research projects, to look for novel properties in our strains that may lead to new industrial applications. For example, we have collaborated with Robert Gordon University and Aberdeen University in projects focused on the production of secondary metabolites from Streptomyces species in our collection. Another project, currently underway with Edinburgh University, funded by the he High Value Biorenewables Network, is screening microbes from the culture collection for their ability to perform chemical transformations. 

Our culture collection will always remain at the heart of NCIMB and I firmly believe it holds within it the solutions to many of the challenges society faces today. I love the idea that scientists isolating new strains and adding them to the culture collection decades ago, could have been depositing the solution to problems that had not yet been defined or fully understood.  As our name suggests the collection includes strains isolated from marine environments and foodstuffs, but it also includes microbes from soil, freshwater and extreme environments. Microbes from extreme environments are especially interesting for industrial biotechnology as they are often a rich source of industrially useful enzymes, and because of their diversity, strains in the collection have potential for a wide range of applications.

The biotech sector holds so much potential for solving the big challenges of our time and the IBioIC conference provides the biotech community with a great opportunity to network, develop new partnerships and keep up to date with support available for innovation. It is an important date in the calendar for NCIMB so we are delighted that it is possible to hold it as an in-person event again this year. While virtual events have kept these kinds of networks alive over the past two years, the chance meetings that can be the beginnings of a new project or collaboration, that could unlock new potential from our culture collection are difficult to replicate in the virtual world.