The Westmead Medical Mycology Collection: basis for research and diagnosis of fungal diseases

The Westmead Medical Mycology Collection is completing20 years of existence. During this time there have been10,073 strains deposited representing 437 species, whicharecurrentlymaintainedinthecollection.Establishedorig-inally under the curation of Professor Wieland Meyer at theMolecular Mycology Research Laboratory, in the Centre forInfectiousDiseasesandMicrobiologyattheSydneyMedicalSchool – Westmead Hospital, The University of Sydney, itrecently moved to the new Westmead Millennium InstituteforMedicalResearchinWestmead,Australia.Itsprimaryaimis to preserve Australian human and animal pathogenicfungal biodiversity while providing reference and clinicalstrains for the mycology community. The stored strains areidentified phenotypically, biochemically and molecularly.Theyarestoredeitherlyophilised,inglycerolat 808Corasliving culture at 148C. The majority of the stored strains arethe result of specific clinical, molecular epidemiologicaland basic science projects. As such, the pathogenic yeastsCryptococcus neoformans and C. gattii account for 54%of the specimens deposited. To further characterisethe maintained strains specific MultiLocus SequenceTyping schemes have been developed for C. neoformans,C. gattii, Scedosporium apiospermum, S. aurantiacum,S. boydii and Pneumocystis jirovecii, which are publicallyaccessible at http://mlst.mycologylab.org. The collectionalso formed the basis for the development of the qualitycontrolled ISHAM-ITS sequence database for human andanimal pathogenic fungi accessible at http://its.mycologylab.org.