Scope of the CGSC Strain Collection

This collection includes only non-pathogenic strains of Escherichia coli: predominantly K-12 derivatives, but a few B strains. It includes cultures of wild-type contributed from a number of laboratories and a few thousand derivatives carrying one or up to 29 mutations from among 3500 mutations in (or included in deletions spanning) more than 1300 different loci. Some combinations were constructed particularly for mapping purposes and are still used for teaching and for rapid localization, some for manifestation of a particular phenotype, some strains for transferring a particular region or for complementation analysis. Some plasmids, e.g., the Clarke and Carbon collection, F-primes, a number of toolkit plasmids, and a few classic plasmids are included, but it is not a comprehensive collection of plasmids.

NEW! Addition of the Keio Knockout Collection

We have recently acquired most of the strains from the Keio Collection of systematic individual gene knockout (deletion/kan insertion) strains. These strains were developed by a collaboration of Nara Institute, Keio University, and Purdue Univ. Strains from this collection are currently available from the CGSC, as well as from the National Institute of Genetics in Japan. Most of the Strain descriptions have now been entered into our database, but a small number have been delayed due to nomenclature issues. If you are unable to locate the strain you are searching for, please send us an email inquiry. You may also check the N.I.G. web site for mutations of individual genes and ORFs that are available. See Baba et al. 2006, Mol. Syst. Biol. 2: 2006 0008.

We are not yet distributing whole sets of the Keio strains, however Open Biosystems has started distributing the full collection.