Cold room (4^oC)

A large (88 sq. ft.) walk-in cold room (Norlake, Inc.) is located in the lab for ready access to stored cultures. Temperature is rigidly controlled, with a deviation over 24 hrs of less than 0.2^oC.

Cultures are stored in zip-loc bags on metal shelving; they are arranged alphabetically by INVAM code number. Click here to see how cultures are prepared for storage and cataloged. Center shelves are on wheels so they can be moved for easy retrieval and reshelving of cultures selected for manipulation or for distribution. No field soils are stored in this room.

Click on photos at right to see larger images.

Dewar Flasks
(-270^oC)

Inocula obtained from the University of Florida are stored long-term by cryopreservation. Sieved material from pot cultures was transferred to 2-ml vials, which were then stored in metal racks positioned within two Dewar flasks filled with liquid nitrogen. These flasks are topped off bi-weekly to keep full. Some of these cultures have been in liquid nitrogen for 15 years and we are beginning to test their viability, in part because we have not had much success with this procedure at WVU.

Lyophilizer

We now have a Virtis 2-K benchtop lyophilizer to determine if freeze drying is a viable alternative to cryopreservation. The main advantages of this approach are: (i) larger volumes of inoculum can be stored and (ii) material can be stored in any constant temperature room (e.g. cold room, lab, etc.). We are experimenting with capped 50-cm³ pastic centrifuge tubes as storage containers.