What would you do if you lost your production yeast tomorrow?

For more than half a century the NCYC has served industry worldwide, providing secure and confidential storage of production strains. We maintain the UK's largest collection of yeast cultures in our ISO9001 accredited laboratory and have particular expertise in working with brewing strains. Today we are at the forefront of yeast technology offering services based on our patented DNA fingerprinting methods and use 'tried and tested' techniques in cryopreservation and freeze drying which guarantee recovery success.

The NCYC are experts in the preservation of brewing yeast strains, having processed many thousands of yeast strains whilst building the National Collection.

To submit your yeast strain into the NCYC Safe Deposit, please register if you are not an existing customer, or login if you are already registered.

Alternatively, the form is available for download here.

Preservation of Safe Deposited Cultures

The NCYC:

• Carries out QA tests before and after storage to ensure the culture supplied is free of contamination.
• Stores the strains in our dedicated liquid nitrogen storage facility at -196°C.
• Stores the strains by freeze-drying with a back-up at a remote site.
• Carries out viability tests on strains before and after preservation.

Security

Each strain will be stored on a strictly confidential basis and will be assigned a 'reserve-collection' number which will only be released to the depositor or parties nominated by the depositor.

Strains stored in Safe Deposit remain the property of the depositor.

Access to Cultures

DNA Fingerprinting: an essential quality control method

If any mutations or contamination have occurred then we can re-supply the original safe deposited strain in pristine condition.

The NCYC has expertise and patented methods in DNA Fingerprinting, allowing precision quality control of your production cultures. This is included in our Premium Package but also available on request at any time.

DNA Fingerprinting:

• Compares your current production strain with the deposited strain.
• Compares strains from different breweries within your company.
• Checks for cross-contamination between production cultures.
• Checks if production cultures are composed of a mixture of strains.
• Checks for genetic drift.
• Checks for the presence of wild yeasts.
• Allows for comparison to fingerprint patterns in our database of over 400 commercial strains.

Yeast Evaluation and purity testing

• Ale/Lager differentiation tests, including Melibiose fermentation test and growth at 37°C.
• Semi anaerobic fermentation tests including Maltotriose fermentation.
• DNA profiling.
• Cell and colony morphology.

Wild Yeast contaminant characterisation:

• Plate tests.
• DNA sequencing.
• DNA Fingerprinting.

Please contact us to discuss how NCYC developed evaluation services and additional quality control checks can benefit the performance of your yeast strain.

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