FAQs

1. What is NAIMCC?

NAIMCC, National Agriculturally Important Microbial Culture Collection, is a unit developed by NBAIM (ICAR) with the mandate to conserve and characterize the agriculturally important microorganisms (AIMs) of the country. It has the state-of-art-facilities for isolation, characterization and preservation of microbial cultures.

2. What is ‘Microbial Passport Data Sheet’?It is a proforma which contains basic information related to microorganisms such as place of isolation, longitude and latitude of place, source of isolation, growth characteristics, identification details, economic importance with reference to agricultural importance, and depositor details for the submission of microbial cultures to the NAIMCC. This data sheet is necessary for processing cultures and thereafter assigning accession number to your cultures.

3.  How depositor can submit the microbial culture(s) to the NAIMCC?

The depositors are required to send duplicate set (preferably in slant or lyophilized form) of each culture to the Director, NBAIM, Mau. Please label your microbial culture along with strain number/name.

4. What is the process of submission of the microbial cultures to the NAIMCC?

The received microbial cultures, NAIMCC verifies for purity and other cultural characteristics matching with the furnished information in passport data sheet submitted by the depositor. After purity check and identity verification, the NAIMCC send cultures to depositor for the confirmation of identity of the microbial cultures available in his/her laboratory. Once the information furnished in the data sheet matches with the submitted cultures and identity confirmation by the depositor, accession number is assigned to microbial culture to be deposited.

5. What is ‘Acknowledgement Card’?

It is a card sent to the depositor to acknowledge receipt of culture(s) by the NAIMCC.

6. What is ‘Accession Card’?
It is a card sent to the depositor with accession number for each strain deposited after verifying purity and identity of microbial cultures.

7. What is Guideline for Registration of microbial germplasm?

NBAIM has published a bulletin on Guideline for Registration of Microbial Germplasm having specific traits of agricultural and Industrial importance. It will provide information pertaining to eligibility criteria and other details for microorganisms to be registered.

8. How many techniques are being used for preservation of microorganisms?

Each microbial culture is preserved by at least two methods depending on the type of microorganism, either in mineral oil storage or storage in glycerol at -80ºC for short-term storage and lyophilization for long term storage. For study and storage up to 1 month, the cultures are being maintained on the slants containing appropriate medium at 4ºC. Optimization of cryopreservation of microorganisms at -196^oC in liquid nitrogen is under way.

9. What is WFCC?

World Federation of Culture Collections (WFCC) is a multidisciplinary commission of the International Union of Biological Sciences (IUBS) and a Federation within the International Union of Microbiological Societies (IUMS). WFCC is concerned with the collection, authentication, maintenance and distribution of cultures of microorganisms. Its aim is to (1) promote and support the establishment of culture collections and related services, (2) provide liaison and set up an information network between the collections and their users, (3) organize workshops and conferences, (4) to publish research and newsletters and (5) ensure the long term perpetuation of important collections. The NAIMCC is registered with WFCC (http://www.wfcc.info/ccinfo/collection/by_id/1060) in 2014.

10. What are the other microbial repositories in India?

National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, India

Microbial Type Culture Collection and Gene Bank (MTCC), IMTECH, Chandigarh, UT, India

Microbial Culture Collection (MCC), NCCS, Pune, India

National Collection of Industrial Microorganisms (NCIM), NCL, Pune, India

Indian Type Culture Collection (ITCC), IARI, New Delhi, India

Directorate of Mushroom Research, Solan, Himachal Pradesh

National Collection of Dairy Cultures, NDRI, Karnal, Haryana, india

Goa University Fungus Culture Collection and Research Unit (GFCC), Goa, India

National Facility of Marine Cyanobacteria (BDU), Bharathidasan University, Trichy, India

National Fungal Culture Collection of India, Agarkar Research Institute, Pune, India

11. What is IDA stands for?

The IDA stand for ‘International Depository Authority’. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) awards the status of IDA to the microbial culture collections of the world for International Recognition of the Deposit of Microorganisms for the purposes of patent procedure under Budapest Treaty.

12. How many IDAs are available in India?

So far only two microbial culture collections have acquired status of IDA:

(a)    Microbial Type Culture Collection and Gene Bank (MTCC), Chandigarh, UT, India

(b)   Microbial Culture Collection (MCC), National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune, Maharastara, India

13. What is NABG ?

A supercomputing environment has been developed for high performance computing in the field of agricultural bioinformatics and computational biology under the project “Establishment of National Agricultural Bioinformatics Grid (NABG) in ICAR” under National Agricultural Innovation Project (NAIP), Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), New Delhi.

14. What are the overall objectives of NABG project ?

• Development of agricultural bioinformatics grid for the country.

• Creation of local databases and Bioinformatics Data Warehouse (BinDW) for genomic resources across species.

• Human resource development in agricultural bioinformatics

• Create and promote inter-disciplinary research groups with focus on agricultural bioinformatics.

15. What is the computing facility established under NABG ?

The supercomputing hub consists of hybrid architecture of high performance computing with 256 nodes Linux cluster with two masters with 3072 cores and 38 Tera Flops computing power at IASRI, New Delhi along with 16 node Linux clusters and one master with 40 TB storage at NBAIM Mau and other ICAR Bureaux. A number of computational biology and bioinformatics softwares, workflows and pipelines along with National Biological Computing Portal are developed to provide seamless access of the biological computing resources to the biological researchers across the country.

16. Which research activities are being carried out under NABG project at NBAIM ?

• Development and management of databases of microbial domain.
• A large collection of the whole genome sequences of cyanobacteria, bacteria and fungal organisms is made to perform standalone bioinformatics work.
• Whole genome annotation program is being carried out and pipeline is being developed.
• Protein structure prediction and modeling is being carried out using microbial proteins.
• Designing of combinatorial library of agriculturally important metabolites.
• Evolutionary Genomics study involving use of genomic sequences for phylogenetic analysis.
• Comparative Genomic Analysis involving study of multiple parameters like Genome Size, Genomic GC content, Gene content, Codon Selection Pattern, Codon-pair Context and Nucleotide Distribution Pattern etc.

17. What is the team NABG at NBAIM ?

The team-NABG at NBAIM is…

Dr. D. P. Singh, Senior Scientist- CCPI, NABG

Dr. Alok Srivastava, Senior Scientist- Co-PI, NABG

Sh. Anurag Chaurasia, Scientist, Co-PI, NABG

Dr. Lalan Sharma, Scientist, Co-PI, NABG

Dr. Dipak Nagrale, Scientist, Co-PI, NABG

Ms. Ratna Prabha, Research Associate, NABG

Mr. Manish Kumar, Research Associate, NABG

Ms. Sevyaa, Senior Research Fellow, NABG