One of the most important, yet often neglected, tasks in any routine microbiology laboratory is to maintain a collection of bacterial and fungal stock cultures. In a busy laboratory it is all too easy for the stock culture collection to deteriorate into a jumble of poorly labelled, partially dried-out agar slant cultures at the back of a refrigerator. But it does not have to be, nor should it be, like that.
Microbial cultures are foundational and basic diagnostic methods used extensively as a research tool in molecular biology. It is often essential to isolate a pure culture of microorganisms. A pure (or axenic) culture is a population of cells or multicellular organisms growing in the absence of other species or types. A pure culture may originate from a single cell or single organism, in which case the cells are genetic clones of one another.