How can a layperson get their hands on a specific strain that's not readily available commercially?

Question

I'm mostly interested to get my hands on L.plantarum D-103, but there are a few other strains as well. D-103 is e.g. mentioned here https://meridian.allenpress.com/jfp/article/80/10/1682/199965/Degradation-of-Histamine-by-Lactobacillus . It's commonly found in miso. My understanding is that the usual way is to find out an active culture collection like the ATCC, and the number that strain hast at that culture collection. But how do I find out this number? (I think it's called the type number). With D-103 specifically the problem seems to be that it's not available at any active culture collection. It's listed as IMAU70005 (I had to google for ages to figure this out, how would you guys figure this out?), but the IMAU is not an active culture collection. What do I do then? I'm not a biologist, just a lay person.

Answer 1

Generally what happens in the scientific community is you go to a culture collection - there are lots of different ones around the world. If they don't have it available, then you write to the authors of a paper on it and ask if they can share some.

In the past this used to be simple; however, now that universities and similar institutes have become much more commercially focussed, they have started to put Material Transfer Agreements (MTA) on any product coming out of them. This means that if you write to an author, they may not be able to share things with you as they also received it under a MTA - though they might be able to direct you to their source. You would also likely have to sign a MTA with the supplying institute (even the ATCC and similar usually have MTA these days), which would restrict what you could do with the material and how long you can keep it and any derivatives for. You would need a lawyer to look over an MTA if you went down that route.

Another complicating factor is that they will be very reluctant to share anything with someone outside of a research institute, for biological safety reasons among many others.

Long story short: you probably can't get these sorts of things easily.