Yeast Biodiversity and Culture Collections

Abstract

It is in the nature of humans to collect, to classify, to organize and to summarize their findings. From the early days of taxonomic surveys and collecting fieldtrips, scientists and amateurs have been gathering samples and evidence related to their discoveries. In those days, the only way to keep track of previous findings was to describe the morphology, the ecology and some basic physiological properties. Species of yeasts were then often described on the basis of one or several specimens but the latter were not always mentioned and/or properly described, analyzed and preserved. When it became mandatory to designate type specimens, for every new species to be described and to keep them available for future reexaminations, the need for proper storage of the material was raised. The first and most obvious way of doing this was by the drying of living specimens and the creation of herbaria. Dried, nonliving material is of great importance in mycology but of limited use for yeasts, since the physiological, biochemical, genetic and ecological properties cannot be properly studied or reexamined. In order to perform more advanced investigations and analyses on previously collected specimens, they had to be kept alive and maintained in a condition as close as possible to their "original" state. This is where the culture collections (CCs) came into the picture, which still play a key role in the preservation of the yeast biodiversity (Agerer et al. 2000; Hawksworth 2004). Proper preservation methods have been mainly developed by scientific staff working for CCs (Mikata and