The CECT is located on the ground floor of the Research Building on the Burjassot Campus of the University of Valencia, in Burjassot (Valencia).

It covers a surface area of around 300 m2, with an office and two laboratories (one for Microbiology and the other for Molecular Biology). Adjoining the Microbiology Lab there is a kitchen where cleaning and sterilizing are carried out and an area for freeze-drying. There are also two cold chambers where the culture media and fungi are preserved, respectively, a climatic chamber for long-term preservation, and a separate space to store material and packaging.

The equipment is typical of a Microbiology laboratory of these characteristics, i.e., one housing a collection of microbial cultures. To this we add, in the Molecular Biology laboratory, PCR apparatus, equipment for electrophoresis, image analysers with their corresponding analysis programs, etc, etc.

Many of the microorganisms that make up the collection are freeze-dried in glass ampoules, which are kept away from day-light, stored in opaque black plastic bags, and ordered by their CECT catalogue number. These freeze-dried micro-organisms are housed in a climatic chamber kept permanently at 18ºC to ensure better preservation and greater viability on later rehydration. However, some of the freeze-dried microorganisms need to be kept at 4ºC, as their viability after preservation at 18ºC is very low. This is why at the CECT we have a storage room at a constant temperature 4ºC, where we keep these freeze-dried strains. As well as through freeze drying, the recently deposited cultures are preserved at -150°C.

Although most of the microorganisms held at the CECT can be kept freeze-dried, there are others, mainly filamentous fungi that cannot be preserved like this. In this case it is necessary to keep them alive by periodical transfer, storing them at 4ºC.

With respect to the computer equipment, the CECT uses two servers to house the web and associated data bases, which also hold the electronic mail and the shared files. Moreover, CECT has a molecular biology server from which one can access different programs to manipulate and align sequences. Likewise, we have a server with back-up copies which are received daily from the data-bases of the other servers.

More information:

SPANISH TYPE CULTURE COLLECTION
Research Building
C. Dr. Moliner, s/n
46100 Burjassot
Tel.: 96 354 46 12
Fax: 96 354 31 87
info@cect.org
www.cect.org