USDA launches ARS Culture Collection - NEW!

USDA has a long history of open science including making microbial strains available to the scientific public at no charge. Annually, USDA distributes 5,500 microbial strains on average to scientists representing the U.S. and 42 other countries. In January of 2024, USDA launched the ARS Culture Collection on its open data repository, Ag Data Commons. This digital version of the Culture Collection contains genetic data generated on microbial strains from the collection. Since January 2024, the site has received 110,000+ views and 2,000+ downloads of datasets. And the collection is growing! Data curators are regularly checking NCBI GenBank for new genome and transcriptome datasets generated from the collection. There are currently 1,278 datasets available to the public from the collection.