Ok, so this is where we store our yeast.
Forgive the background noise but in here there is a lot of machinery to keep the yeast and
the machinery in here cool.
So this is our liquid nitrogen storage facility.
There is about 200 litres of liquid nitrogen in there and it holds the yeast somewhere
in the region of 4000 yeast strains are currently stored in there under liquid nitrogen which
is at -196°C. Ok.
So now we will open it up and show you what is in there.
Ok, so the National Collection of Yeast Cultures as you probably won't be surprised to learn
is a collection of yeasts we have been collecting now since 1948 and our aim is to collect the
broadest diversity of yeast possible.
So what we are trying to do is to maximise the available gene pool for exploitation in
industry.
They are used for all sorts of things in industry and it is not just for brewing and baking
but there are a whole load of biotechnological applications and indeed it is a very leading
organism in academic research as well.
We try to keep a whole broad range of different isolates from the environment, isolates from
industrial processes.
So this is one of the columns where the yeast are stored in.
So each drawer has got quite a number of straws of each yeast strain so each yeast is probably
there in about at least six different straws.
The modern applications of yeast are very much in the area of industrial biotechnology
so we are looking for yeast that can produce fuels and chemicals so that the chemicals
of the future, we think, will be based on bio-based renewable substrates and that's
the kind of thing we are looking to utilise our yeast in the biorefinery.
They say that the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stone, I think the oil age won't
end because we run out of oil, we will just find better more renewal ways, more environmentally
friendly ways of doing it and yeast have a whole plethora of different genes and genetic
diversity, the way that they put their genes together, the way that they make or even metabolise
substrates such as wheat straw or derivatives of wheat straw, for example, is one way that
we will use yeast in the future.
This material is oil seed rape straw.
It is one of the food chain wastes that we work on here at the Biorefinery Centre and
we use this material as a starting point to make products such as ethanol, platform and
fine chemicals using yeast from the National Collection of Yeast Cultures.
One of the things we have been developing are specialised bioreactors that can handle
biomass and enable the yeast to operate optimally and we will be using those to produce the
various platform chemicals which can then be purified and exploited.
You know, for the long term storage this is really the gold standard.
So this is our primary storage of the yeasts and we also have the yeast stored as freeze-dried
ampules upstairs in the cold room.
Ok, so the main preservation technique we use is under liquid nitrogen but in fact for
distributing yeast around the world it is better to put them into a more robust transport
medium and we use freeze-dried glass ampules as the main way of doing that because once
they are freeze-dried and they're under vacuum then they are very stable and can survive
very extreme temperatures in the post and arrive in a good form for re-generating when
they get to the final destination.
Yes, it is quite easy to revive.
The key thing is not to thaw them too quickly because what you are trying to avoid is ice
crystals forming because if you get ice crystals form within the cells then the cells will
just burst.
So it is a controlled thaw but once you have done that they revive very quickly and you
can have a healthy culture growing within 2 to 3 days.
We are currently being funded as a BBSRC National Capability so it is recognised that the physical
collection is just one aspect of the national capability.
We have links to the synthetic yeast project, we have links to various biorefinery research
that is going on in the UK, so it is very much a multifaceted operation that provides
that national capability.
It is not just the genetic resources in the collection.