But as government priorities apparently change, and as the federal money that historically created and preserved many of these biological resource repositories in the U.S. dries up, their infrastructure is at risk of deteriorating. With less funding for daily curation—such as occasionally reviving strains to maintain viability, in addition to licensing and distributing them—the less accessible these collections become. Plant pathologist David Geiser oversees The Pennsylvania State University’s collection of 20,000 samples of species in the genus Fusarium, a ubiquitous soil fungus that can be pathogenic. When the collection’s previous curator retired, Geiser found that grant funding for a full-time replacement was practically nonexistent. “There’s a national crisis that’s going on with culture collections,” he says. “It’s been going on for a long time; it’s just gotten worse lately.”
One way to help maintain at least some microbe libraries would be raising user fees. Private U.S. collections set up to generate revenue, however, often charge researchers $250 to $350 per strain—which can deter early-stage investigations and historically underserved institutions. And privatization removes obligations to distribute strains publicly, making it easier to keep them secret. Sourcing strains overseas poses legal and logistical problems, and isolating them from nature or getting them from peers runs the risk of using nonidentical or mutated microbes—potentially compounding reproducibility problems in research.
Unlike some other countries, the U.S. has no centralized facility to store strains. And there is no microbial equivalent of the giant Arctic vault in Svalbard, Norway, where the nonprofit Global Crop Diversity Trust preserves crucial food-crop seeds in the event of natural or man-made disasters. But Kevin McCluskey, a researcher at Kansas State University who oversees the school’s Fungal Genetics Stock Center (a collection of 25,000 filamentous fungi, including mostly mutant strains), says some microbes are also important for agriculture because they fend off pathogens and harmful compounds produced by fungi. “There’s all sorts of things we’re learning how to do with microbes,” he says. “We need those publicly available—not behind a paywall.” To that end McCluskey has been organizing a National Science Foundation–funded project called the U.S. Culture Collection Network, which aims to preserve vulnerable collections, sponsor related workshops and training sessions, and implement a long-range management plan to keep collections open.
