Cecilia Rad-Menéndez, Rachel Allen, Joanne Field, Karen MacKechnie, Ryan Marchington, Rachel Saxon, Naomi Thomas and Michael Ross.
Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa (CCAP), Scottish Association for Marine Science, Oban, PA371QA, Scotland, UK
The Culture Collection of Algae and Protozoa (CCAP) is a very diverse biological resource centre with nearly 3000 strains of microalgae, macroalgae, cyanobacteria and protozoa. Of those, 900 are macroalgae, covering a broad diversity with around 100 genera and 200 species.
CCAP has a long history of cryopreservation research and many of the strains in the collection have been cryopreserved. Cryopreservation can offer a great solution to establish seaweed biobanks and enable the preservation of genetic diversity for future research, industrialisation, and as a way of ex-situ conservation of diversity that might be able to regenerate species that are lost to their natural habitat.
The brown kelp Saccharina latissima has been identified as a key biological resource due to its relevance environmentally and as a key species for European aquaculture, with ongoing breeding programs being established to improve its cultivation. To preserve these resources, a biobank was created in collaboration with partners of the H2020 GENIALG consortium. Fertile S. latissima sporophytes were sampled across the species’ European biogeographic range, with female and male gametophytes isolated and cryopreserved according to methods established by Visch et al. (2019). These strains and metadata are publically available, and represent an extensive, genetically characterised, biological resource encompassing the European range of S. latissima.
Culture collections, such as CCAP have huge ecological and economic importance, for the seaweed aquaculture which relies upon genetic diversity for developing breeding programs but also for the conservation and management of wild populations that might be vulnerable to climate change.