NCTC Celebrates its 90th Anniversary

This year the National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) celebrates its 90th anniversary.

Established in 1920, NCTC was the first collection in the world to offer a supply service of bacterial cultures. The original order book records Sir Alexander Fleming (famous for discovering penicillin) of St. Mary's Hospital, Paddington, London being among the first customers to receive cultures from NCTC in 1920. In 1947 NCTC restricted itself to only bacteria of medical and veterinary interest and the remaining cultures were used as nuclei to set up additional specialist national culture collections, e.g. NCIMB in Aberdeen.

NCTC cultures have been preserved by freeze-drying since 1950 onwards. Regular checks are made on viability and we now have several cultures which have undergone 55-year viability counts and shown no drop in viability level, vindicating the choice of this method for culture preservation.Ninety years on and now part of the Health Protection Agency Culture Collections, NCTC continues to supply well-authenticated bacterial reference cultures of medical and veterinary importance world-wide.

Below is a picture taken of the NCTC team in 1962