University of Valencia logo Logo Spanish Type Culture Collection Logo del portal

Since January 2011 the CECT is located on the ground floor of the Building 3 CUE of the Science Park of the University of Valencia, Paterna, and at a distance of 10 km from Valencia. It occupies an area of about 750 m2.

To comply with the biosafety regulations for Microbial Resource Centers it has two separate wings, one is restricted only for the CECT staff and the other has open access. The restricted area encompasses the curators office, two laboratories (one for Prokaryotes -bacteria and archaea- and one for Eukaryotes -filamentous fungi and yeast-), three rooms (cleaning and sterilization, culture media preparation, and lyophilisation), four cold chambers (preservation of culture media, preservation of strains sensitive to lyophilisation or freezing, preservation of users’ samples (for deposit or identification) and long-term preservation of microorganisms -lyophilized or in liquid nitrogen-), and one room with several freezers at - 80°C as a complementary/alternative method for the preservation of microorganisms. The open access area holds several offices (management, administration, orders reception, researchers, etc.), four specialized laboratories (chemotaxonomy, molecular techniques, training and general microbiology laboratory for short stays of invited researchers) and a documentation room.

The most effective method for microbial long term preservation is lyophilisation. For this reason, most of the CECT strains are kept lyophilized in glass ampoules protected from light (in opaque plastic bags) at a constant temperature of 10 °C. However, some microbial groups, like certain genera of filamentous fungi, do not resist this method. These strains are maintained active through periodical subculturing and storage at 4 °C. In addition, all the strains are kept at -80°C as a second preservation method. Furthermore, we are starting to prepare a duplicate of all the strains of the collection and this duplicate is allocated in a different facility (approximately 1 mile away of distance) in compliance with the Best Practice Guideline for Microbial Resources Centers.

In regard to the computer equipment, the CECT maintains several servers to house the electronic mail and shared files. Furthermore, CECT has a dedicated molecular biology server from which different programs for the manipulation and alignment of sequences and other data can be accessed. Automatic back-up copies of the servers’ data are periodically sent to remote back-up servers.