Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute

The Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute keeps living fungi, not merely their dried traces. The collection comprises more than a hundred thousand strains representing tens of thousands of taxa. A strain is a particular culture line with a history of origin and a number that allows the same material to be ordered for an independent experiment. That is what makes a result from a laboratory in one country reproducible in another.

A living collection requires continuous care. Cultures are stored by methods that limit change, checked for purity and identity, and some are placed in several forms of safeguarding. The material serves agricultural, industrial and medical mycology: from identifying a pathogen to studying an enzyme, a metabolite or resistance to a drug. The institute also develops nomenclatural databases and services, including MycoBank, and provides training and diagnostic support.

Not every strain can be released to every recipient. Biosafety level, the rules of the country of origin, material transfer conditions and the stated purpose all matter. Ordering a culture is not the equivalent of buying spawn of an edible species in a shop. The institution checks the requirements, and the recipient is responsible for an appropriate laboratory, transport and documentation. It is precisely that rigour that makes a collection number a reliable point of reference in a publication.

The premises in Utrecht are a place of work, not a permanent tourist attraction. A research visit, training or collection of material requires contact with the relevant team. For someone interested in fungi, the best access is the online catalogue, the publications and the announced events. The collection illustrates an important difference between a fungarium and a culture bank: the first preserves a specimen and its characters at a given moment, the second maintains an organism able to grow again. Both forms are needed, but they answer different questions. A scientific publication should always give the specific strain number, not just the name of the institute.

A living strain is not a name record

The Westerdijk Institute maintains more than 100,000 living strains: about 70,000 filamentous fungi, over 8,000 ex-type strains and representatives of roughly 12,000 species. A strain can support reproducible research, and ex-type material descends from the specimen on which a description was based. That does not mean every name in MycoBank has a corresponding culture here. MycoBank registers nomenclature; CBS preserves selected living organisms. The distinction matters when designing an experiment. Access depends on user identification, intended use, biosafety and shipping rules, while individual strains may carry additional restrictions.