National Collection of Type Cultures
National Collection of Type Cultures (NCTC) is one of the four culture collections that constitutes the Culture Collections operated by Public Health England. It is a non-profit culture collection repository located in the UK. NCTC maintains over 5100 bacterial cultures, over 100 Mycoplasmas and more than 500 plasmids, host strains, bacteriophages and transposons. Of these, 150 strains are available from NCTC in the form of bacterial DNA, supplied at 2µg, making them suitable for whole genome sequencing amongst other molecular applications. The cultures represent bacteria from widespread geographical locations and are transported in fused-glass ampoules.
NCTC was founded in 1920 making it the first established bacterial collection in the world. The collection is certified to BS EN ISO 9001:2008 and is a major supplier of many bacterial strains which are of medial, scientific and veterinary significance worldwide. NCTC supplies bacterial cultures to support academia, food, health and veterinary institutions for research.
The website enables customers to search either via collection or alphabetically for the strains and also has a searchable database for a customised query.