At Beneficial Microbes and want to know more about NCIMB?

• Great customer service and communication: The feedback we receive from our customers tells us that they value the high levels of customer service that we provide. We work hard to make things easy for you.
• Strong track record of working with companies and research groups in the microbiome, probiotics and live biotherapeutics sector, supplying strains, offsite storage of biological materials and sequencing services.
• Well equipped laboratories: Our new purpose built laboratories are well equipped for microbiome work and include containment level 3 laboratory facilities.
• Our heritage as a culture collection: NCIMB has been preserving, storing and distributing microorganisms for 75 years. Our culture collection includes many microbiome relevant strains, and strains from species on the EFSA qualified presumption of safety list.

We have experience of working with many different sample types including:

• Faecal samples
• Bacterial isolates
• Soils and sediments
• Water samples and effluents
• Swabs
• Biofilm samples

We are always happy to discuss your requirements and advise on sample volumes, storage and transport of samples to us. Get in touch to find out more.

Our culture collection, the National Collection of Industrial, Food and Marine Bacteria, is part of the UK's Biological Resource Network. It's a fantastic collection of thousands of ACDP category 1 & 2 organisms that includes many microbiome-relevant strains.  The collection includes human microbiome strains, including gut commensals, as well as strains isolated from fermented foods and a rich diversity of other source such as soil, waters, plants and the rhizosphere.

The collection also includes many strains from species included on the European Food Safety Authority Qualified Presumption of Safety list. You can browse these strains on this page.

Our standard material transfer agreement is for research use and we also provide licenses for commercial use of our strains.

Enumeration of viable microorganisms can be a key requirement for microbiome researchers and companies developing probiotic products, but it is a challenging task.  There has therefore been growing interest in PMA-qPCR, i.e. a qPCR method that can distinguish between living and dead cells, as a way of addressing this challenge.

At NCIMB we carry out projects to support our customers’ process and product development and have experience of undertaking PMA-qPCR as part of customer projects. If you are interested in exploring the use of viability qPCR within a research project, get in touch to find out more.

At NCIMB we have more than seventy years' experience of preserving and safely storing biological material. An offsite back up can reduce the risk of loss of your important strains and we can tailor a storage package to your needs.

NCIMB is an International Depositary Authority under the Budapest Treaty, and accepts patent deposits of bacteria, fungi, bacteriophage, plasmids, plant seeds and plant cell tissue culture.