Some people collect stamps, others collect baseball cards. Jerry Brand and Rory O'Neil are collectors of a different sort, however. They are the managers of the University's Culture Collection of Algae, the premier collection of its kind in the world.
"Form and color have always been attractive to me," said O'Neil, the collection's curator. "With algae, you only need to take a sample, put it on a microscope slide and look in, and it's just the whole package, if you will.
"You have to fight not to fall in love with it. I did not fight."
The collection, established 50 years ago at Indiana University and subsequently moved to Texas, is home to more than 2,300 different strands of living algae, said Brand, the collection's director.
Brand said the collection, known by its caretakers as UTEX, was created to make algae strains available to anyone who wants to buy them.
UTEX is funded in small part by these sales, but about half of the money comes from the National Science Foundation, and a quarter comes from the College of Natural Sciences.
Brand said UTEX employs four to seven undergraduate students every year in addition to its permanent staff.
Ann Clemens, a biology senior, has been working at UTEX for more than a year, taking close-up photos of the algae for the collection's Web site.
"A lot of people request pictures," Clemens said. "It's interesting to see what they want them for. A cosmetics company once asked for a picture because they apparently used algae in some of the cosmetics, and they wanted to use it in some kind of advertisement."
Brand said the ordered samples are sent around the world to different government agencies, universities, research institutions and companies for a variety of different purposes.
"The cultures are used for fish food, shellfish food, human food, water quality tests, biotechnology and research," Brand said.
O'Neil said algae's simplicity is a big part of its success in research.
"They're simple plants, if you will. They're easy to grow in culture, and being simple organisms, you can tend to better understand experimental results," O'Neil said. "You get a better understanding of what's going on with a single type of cell."
Alexandra Holland, UTEX's culture collection manager, handles orders placed to UTEX. She says she receives around 11 orders a week.
"We've taken orders from every continent except Antarc-tica," Holland said. "About 20 percent of our orders come from foreign countries."
Holland said despite the collection's international notoriety, it remains little-known within the University.
"Most people don't know we exist," she said. "We're known worldwide, but not on campus."
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