Microbial Culture Collections play an important role in offering services not only to preserve microorganisms using techniques that maintain viability, purity, and important characteristics of microorganisms, but also to supply high quality microorganisms for use in teaching, research and industrial applications. In Pakistan, long term preservation of microbes is a neglected subject. The importance of microbes in biotechnological, agricultural and industrial applications has pushed many Institutes to collect the indigenous beneficial microbes from various ecological zones of Pakistan. However, most of the strains collected by various labs were either stocked in glycerol as un-identified strains or abolished with time due to contamination or loss of interest of researchers at end of the project. Recently, Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC) took an initiative to start working on identification and preservation of economically important bacterial strains from Pakistani ecology. In this regard, PARC established “Institute for Microbial Culture Collection of Pakistan (IMCCP)” for preservation of microbial bio-asset of Pakistan. During our studies for collection and preservation of indigenous beneficial strains from Pakistani ecology, many promising novel candidate strains were identified based upon 16S rRNA gene sequencing, which can be delineated as novel species. Now, it is first time in the history of Pakistan, that several novel species of bacteria have been validated from Pakistani ecology in collaboration with JCM, Riken, Japan and KCTC, KRIBB, Korea to delineate our candidate strains as novel species:
-- Cellulomonas pakistanensis sp. nov., (validated – 2014);
-- Sphinogobacterium pakistanense sp. nov., (validated – 2014);
-- Bacillus pakistanensis sp. nov., (validated – 2014);
-- Lysinibacillus pakistanensis sp. nov., (validated – 2014);
-- Lysinibacillus composti sp. nov., (validated – 2014),
-- Deinnococcus citri sp. nov., (validated – 2014);
-- Kushneria pakistanensis sp. nov., (validated – 2015);
-- Acinetobacter pakistanensis sp. nov., (validated – 2015);
-- Bacillus malikii sp. nov., (Validated--2016);
-- Alcaligenes pakistanensis sp. nov., (Validated 2016);
-- Nocardioides pakistanensis sp. nov., (Validated 2016);
Our goal is to collect many more strains from various Institutes for identification and preservation in NCCP. Since, identification and systematics of bacteria have not been extensively included in the main applied microbiological research work in Pakistan, therefore, this rich bio-asset offers an opportunity to explore many novel species of bacteria by identification, poly-phasic characterization and thus to preserve in National Culture Collection of Pakistan (NCCP), which is the ultimate goal of PARC project.
