AIMS Biodiversity Collection

The AIMS Biodiversity Collection is the centrepiece of a 10 year strategic push by a team of marine natural products experts to create an exciting source of novel compounds from the marine realm. It represents the world’s most comprehensive and biodiverse collection of Australasian marine biota curated specifically for natural products screening.

The collection samples over 1,500 sites from Australia’s coastline, continental shelf and territorial waters, spanning habitats from the intertidal to depths of over 1000 metres. It represents all major marine phyla from diverse habitats including extreme environments.

The >10,000 macroorganisms exhibit a high proportion of new and/or endemic species. A further >7,000 microorgansims include commercially important groups such as Actinomycete bacteria and fungi. Culture methods developed at AIMS have enhanced the novelty of strains isolated from diverse marine sources. Macroorganism samples have a taxonomic voucher, extract and in most cases, frozen bulk sample for further customised extract production.

Many microbial cultures have been extracted from a variety of fermentation conditions, and are cryopreserved for further customised extraction and taxonomy.

Site, organism and ecological descriptions, still / video imagery, and details of microbial isolation and culture are recorded. This sample acquisition data is combined with data from all functional areas of the research project in a comprehensive information management system.

The AIMS Biodiversity Collection is unique in the scope and novelty of the organisms it represents and is set in a peerless scientific support framework for bioassay development, screening and natural products chemistry.

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Last updated - December 18, 2008

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