Sammlung von Algenkulturen (SAG)
The Sammlung von Algenkulturen der Universität Göttingen (Culture Collection of Algae at Göttingen University, international acronym SAG), is a comprehensive biological resource centre of living culture material of microalgae and is among the largest algal service collections in the world.
- It is supporting the scientific, biotechnological and educational communities worldwide by its various services and curatorial roles. They include expert knowledge on the ex situ conservation, isolation as well as identification of microalgae.
- About 2300 strains, representing almost all classes and phyla of eukaryotic algae as well as cyanobacteria and comprising more than 500 genera and 1400 named species, are available from the SAG.
- The SAG Culture Collection receives requests for algal cultures from scientists worldwide from various types of institutions, industry, and environmental research agencies as well as universities and high schools for educational purposes.
- Quality of the algal material is assessed using growth tests for contamination, microscopic documentation and include routine application of DNA sequence signatures and bar codes.
- Algal strains are characterized using molecular tools for unambiguous identification and authentication.
- Genetically stable stocks of cultures are available through cryopreservation.
- High resolution AFLP fingerprinting has been established at the SAG as a sensitive molecular tool to unambiguously assess diversity among strains of the same species (multiple strains) and to check for genomic/metagenomic integrity of strains after cryopreservation.
