Ben Shen microbial collection assembled by Pfizer

For nearly a century, the pharmaceutical company collected microorganisms of potential drug value.  Now that collection of 217,552 microbial strains has been given to the Scripps Institute (Jupiter, FL) for curation and research. “Each microbe is estimated to encode an average of 30 natural products; Pfizer’s collection likely held millions of novel molecules waiting to be discovered . . . .”   MORE

Image Credit: Scott Wiseman, Scripps Institute