This award provides continued partial support for the collection of protozoa and algae housed at the American Type Culture Collections. The collection maintains mostly free living and some parasitic protozoa and those algae that can be cryopreserved. The Collection distributes the organisms as well as information associated with them to the world research community. The goals of the Collection during this funding period include: (1) maintain the high level of quality control of the Collection, (2) where necessary, apply state-of-the-art methodologies to improve the authentication of certain strains; (3) apply improved preservation methodologies to lower costs and facilitate distribution, (4) diversify the holdings to include members of major groups of fee-living protozoa not currently held and expand holdings of groups that are poorly represented, (5) organize the strain information into computer databases that are accessible to the user community, and (6) to optimize quality control of its holdings.
