About State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources

State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources

The State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources is a national research laboratory at the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IMCAS) in Beijing, China's largest microbiological research institution. Where other laboratories study microorganisms mainly as objects of experiment, this laboratory's founding idea is that microorganisms are also a national resource: a living stock of bacteria, fungi, archaea and other microbes that must be collected, identified, preserved and evaluated before it can be used — in fermentation and industrial biotechnology, in agriculture, in medicine and in environmental protection. The laboratory anchors the institute's work on microbial resources, diversity and innovative utilisation, and it operates alongside some of the largest biological collections in Asia.

The host institute

The Institute of Microbiology was founded on 3 December 1958 through the merger of two Chinese Academy of Sciences bodies, the Institute of Applied Mycology and the Beijing Laboratory of Microbiology, previously led by Professors Dai Fanglan and Fang Xinfang respectively. It was initially located in Zhongguancun, in Beijing's Haidian District, and in early 2007 the major part of the institute relocated to the CAS Life Science Park near the Olympic Village in Chaoyang District. Nine academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and one of the Chinese Academy of Engineering have worked at the institute; its older generation, represented by academicians Dai Fanglan, Deng Shuqun and Yan Xunchu, founded mycology and actinomycete taxonomy in China, while the industrial microbiologists around academician Fang Xinfang made fundamental contributions to China's fermentation industry. The institute's early research divisions covered mycology, virology, physiology and biochemistry, biophysics, genetics, agricultural microbiology, industrial microbiology and geomicrobiology, with great effort devoted to surveying microbial resources and studying microbial metabolism and genetic variation — the resource-centred mission from which this laboratory descends.

Lineage and reorganisation

The laboratory's intellectual lineage reaches back to the Plant Pathology and Mycology Laboratory established in 1953, and its history is described by the institute as a cradle for distinguished academicians including Dai Fanglan, Deng Shuqun, Fang Xinfang, Yan Xunchu, Zhang Shuzheng, Wei Jiangchun, Zheng Ruyong and Zhuang Wenying, playing a pioneering and foundational role in microbial diversity and taxonomy, mycology, industrial biotechnology, and microbial biochemistry and enzymology in China. It spearheaded landmark projects including the compilation of the Flora Fungorum Sinicorum and nationwide microbial diversity surveys, and was instrumental in initiating China's microbial culture collection efforts.

In the recent reorganisation of China's state key laboratories, the institute's English pages present the laboratory's reorganised form as the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Diversity and Innovative Utilization. The reorganised laboratory is dedicated to national demand-driven basic research in microbiology and works in three core research areas: microbial diversity and intelligent resource mining; the design of microbial catalytic elements and the development of genome editing technologies; and microbial cell design and microbiome engineering. This profile retains the laboratory's long-attested name, State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources, under which its research divisions and groups have been described in the institute's own listings.

What the laboratory studies

The institute's research-division listings describe the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources (SKLMR) as conducting basic and application-oriented research on microbial resources and their biotechnological exploitation, with emphasis on four aspects. The first is the collection, evaluation and ecological functions of microbial resources — the field and laboratory work of finding microbes in nature, establishing what they are and what they do in their ecosystems. The second is the biology and adaptive mechanisms of extremophiles, organisms that live at extremes of salt, temperature, acidity or other conditions. The third is the biosynthesis and metabolic regulation of microbial bioactive substances — the antibiotics, enzymes, pigments and other useful compounds microbes produce, and how their production is controlled. The fourth is microbial biocatalysis and bioconversion, the use of microbes and their enzymes as industrial catalysts. Together the four emphases form a pipeline that runs from a sample collected in the field to a characterised strain in a collection, to an understood metabolic pathway, to an industrial process.

The culture collection

The laboratory's resource mission is embodied in the institute's collections. The China General Microbiological Culture Collection Center (CGMCC) is the earliest microbial resource collection and sharing centre in China: its predecessor can be traced to the Fermentation and Bacteriology Laboratory of the Yellow Sea Chemical Research Society in 1931, and CGMCC itself was founded in 1979 as the central culture collection in China's cooperative network of collections. It has served as a patent depository organisation designated by China's Patent Bureau since 1985 and as an International Depositary Authority under the Budapest Treaty since 1995, and it participates in the national science and technology infrastructure programme as the core facility for general microbes. CGMCC's work includes isolating, collecting, preserving, exchanging and supplying microbial strains; preserving culturable biological materials used in patent procedures; and researching strain preservation, isolation and cultivation, and identification technologies. It currently maintains more than 15,500 microbial species encompassing over 115,000 strains, more than 35,000 strains of culturable biological materials held for patent purposes, and a microbial metagenomic library of more than 750,000 clones, providing species, genetic and information resources and technical services for industrial and agricultural production, public health, environmental protection, research and education.

The fungal herbarium and mycology

Alongside the living culture collection sits the institute's fungal herbarium, the largest in Asia, with over 580,000 specimens. The herbarium is the physical archive behind the institute's historic strength in mycology: the systematic study of fungi that began with Dai Fanglan's generation, produced the multi-decade Flora Fungorum Sinicorum compilation, and underpins national surveys of fungal diversity. Preserved specimens allow identifications made decades ago to be re-checked with modern methods, anchor the names of newly described species, and document how China's fungal diversity is distributed and changing. In the institute's present structure this mycological work continues in a dedicated mycology and innovative technology laboratory, one of seven laboratories in the current research system, while the resources laboratory's reorganised successor continues to draw on the herbarium as what the institute calls a world-class platform.

Extremophiles: life at the limits

The extremophile strand of the laboratory studies how microbes adapt to environments hostile to most life, both for the evolutionary insight and because extremophile enzymes and pathways are valuable industrial tools. One attested group, led by Professor Hua Xiang, works on the genetics, metabolism and functional genomics of extremely halophilic archaea — microbes that require very high salt concentrations. Another, led by Professor Cheng Jin, uses the extremely halophilic archaeon Haloarcula hispanica as a model: the group had previously characterised protein glycosylation in the organism and identified genes involved in it, including a novel flippase, and in January 2023 reported in the Journal of Biological Chemistry the first dolichol phosphate glucuronyltransferase identified in any of the three domains of life. The enzyme, AepG, produces the donor molecule for synthesis of the organism's acidic exopolysaccharide and is vital to its adaptation to a high-salt environment — a result the institute notes may offer a starting point for the biosynthesis of functional exopolysaccharides with biotechnological potential. Work of this kind shows how resource-oriented microbiology operates: an organism collected for its strangeness becomes, through functional genomics, a source of enzymes and materials found nowhere else.

From resources to industry

The applied end of the laboratory's pipeline has a long record at institute level. Early in the 1980s the institute published foundational work in international venues, and in 1986 it independently developed a two-step microbial fermentation technology for producing vitamin C; the intellectual property was transferred to F. Hoffmann-La Roche for a patent fee of 5.5 million US dollars, then a record for a Chinese technology export. The institute states that its scientists helped break foreign monopolies and established the foundation for China's amino acid, vitamin and saccharification industries — industries that rest directly on preserved, characterised microbial strains of exactly the kind this laboratory curates. More recently, the reorganised laboratory reports that fourteen major achievements, represented by "Biomanufacturing of Vitamin C", have won national science and technology awards. Its stated forward agenda — intelligent mining of microbial diversity, design of catalytic elements, genome editing, microbial cell design and microbiome engineering — is the contemporary form of the same pipeline, now driven by genomic and metagenomic data.

Data infrastructure

Modern resource microbiology is as much about information as about specimens. The institute hosts the National Microbiology Data Center, and the CGMCC's holdings are catalogued and shared as information resources alongside the physical strains; the metagenomic library of more than 750,000 clones extends the collection beyond cultured organisms to genetic material sampled directly from the environment. In its reorganised form the laboratory lists microbial diversity and intelligent resource mining as its first core area — signalling that discovery increasingly begins in sequence databases and survey data, with the culture collection and herbarium providing the verified physical material that gives those data meaning.

Significance

Within China's laboratory system, the State Key Laboratory of Microbial Resources occupies the foundational position: it maintains the living and preserved collections, the taxonomy and the resource science on which applied microbiology depends. Its setting — an institute founded in 1958 that remains China's largest for microbiology, holding Asia's largest fungal herbarium and a culture collection of over 115,000 live strains — makes it a national infrastructure as much as a research group. Its reorganisation as a laboratory of microbial diversity and innovative utilisation, with agendas in genome editing, cell design and microbiome engineering, shows the direction of travel: from collecting what microbes exist, toward designing what microbes can do.