Abstract: Culture collections are organizations collecting, identifying, preserving and distributing microbial strains, which play a very important role in modern society. The first microbial culture collection was founded at the end of 18 century, which followed by hundreds of other collections in the next 100 year. These organizations vary in sizes and purposes, some of which widely collect all kinds of biological samples whereas the others are specialized in certain kinds of microorganisms. Nowadays, culture collections aim at not only collecting and maintaining microbial strains, but also microbiological related materials, such as cell lines, hybridoma, DNA, RNA and Proteins. To establish global standard for biosafety and protocols, to integrate data and share information among all collections worldwide are the developing directions for WFCC (World Federation for Culture Collections). This review focus on the history and development of fungal collections.

Key words: culture collection, microorganism, fungi, WFCC, strain