American Type Culture Collection - Facilities

Facilities

ATCC activities are housed in a custom-built facility in Manassas, Virginia. The 126,000 sq ft (11,700 m2). building is monitored constantly by on-site security staff, and electric power is backed up by on-site generators. The repository portion of the facility occupies 18,000 sq ft (1,700 m2). and contains 200 freezers to store biomaterials, including 65 vapor-phase liquid nitrogen freezers and 50 mechanical freezers, as well as cold rooms for storage at 4°-8 °C. The repository space is complemented by 35,000 sq ft (3,300 m2). of laboratory space. ATCC also occupies 45,000 sq ft (4,200 m2) of research and administrative space at the Prince William County campus of George Mason University, which is located across the street from ATCC’s Manassas building.

The community of users of ATCC products and services is international, and includes researchers in academia and government, as well as private industry. Over 80% of ATCC’s 17,000-strong customer base represents academia and industry – 42% from universities and colleges and 41% from private industry. Government customers comprise 6% of the organization’s total. Three-quarters of ATCC customers hail from the U.S., while the remaining 25% are international customers. ATCC maintains authorized distributors in Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, Israel, and Taiwan, and makes other international shipments directly from its Virginia facilities. Among the industries represented ATCC’s customer base are the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, agricultural and diagnostics industries, as well as food, beverage and cosmetics makers and reference and testing laboratories.

The ATCC also has close working links with several other international culture collections, such as the UK's National Collection of Plant Pathogenic Bacteria (NCPPB), Landcare Research in New Zealand, the Collection Française de Bactéries Phytopathogènes (CFBP, or Collection of Plant Pathogenic Bacteria) in France, Belgian Co-ordinated Collections of Micro-organisms (BCCM), IBSF in Brazil, the Deutsche Sammlung von Mikroorganismen und Zellkulturen (DSMZ, or German Collection of Microorganisms and Cell Cultures), the Japanese Collection of Research Bioresources (JCRB), and others.