How did the UTEX collection start?\u00a0<\/p>\n
Richard Starr, the founder of our collection, met a man named Ernst Pringsheim in 1953, who gifted him some cultures when they were both at Cambridge University in England. Pringsheim was one of the first people to study and grow algae in the early 1900s, and he escaped from the Nazis with his collection of about 400 strains several years before meeting Starr. Starr brought cultures back to the United States and grew the cultures into a collection, eventually returning to where he had gotten his Ph.D., here at UT. When he returned in 1976, he brought 2,000 strains with him, taking over a space in the Biological Laboratories Building and renamed it the UTEX Culture Collection. He was the director until he passed away unexpectedly in 1998, when Jerry Brand succeeded him. The collection still exists today largely because of Brand\u2019s dedication and skill. We still have some of the original strains from the early 1900s in the collection because of him. Jerry retired in 2015, and I became just the third director. This year, the collection\u2019s 50th anniversary, we finally moved out of our old space and into a new one in the Moffett Molecular Biology Building, a more modern space for the collection.\u00a0<\/p>\n
How did the collection grow to what it is today?<\/p>\n
Mostly, the collection grew by accretion. Many researchers have private collections. After they retire, they will bequeath us their most important organisms, to take care of and make available to others. It\u2019s a big responsibility, taking care of someone else\u2019s life\u2019s work. But it\u2019s also a tremendous honor to do this for the community. I\u2019ve just done my best to be a good steward of the collection.<\/p>\n
Do you have any famous strains of algae in the collection?<\/p>\n
We have the algae used in the original experiments that revealed the Calvin cycle. That\u2019s the process in which carbon is removed from the air by photosynthetic organisms to make sugars, which not only helps the organisms grow but also provides food for all living creatures on Earth. Most people learn about it in school.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How did the UTEX collection start?\u00a0 Richard Starr, the founder of our collection, met a man named Ernst…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463921,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[132,134,133],"class_list":["post-463920","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-austin","tag-austin","tag-austin-headlines","tag-austin-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463920","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463920"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463920\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463921"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463920"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463920"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463920"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}