Nereus has a unique collection of over 20,000 marine microorganisms, with over 13,000 high quality extracts and 16,000 well-characterized fractions derived from these organisms currently on hand. The size of this high quality library is limited by design to focus on maximum biological and chemical diversity. The company continues to expand the diversity of this collection through marine organism acquisition, microbial isolation, extract generation and fractionation. Samples are collected from diverse territories, environmental conditions and microbial habitats and are processed to facilitate the isolation of rare microorganisms. Morphological characterization and genetic analyses are used to select the most diverse microorganisms for fermentation.

The company uses genetic analysis to demonstrate the diversity contained within its microbial collection at the genus level. Of special note is the reduced representation of the Streptomyces genus, which typically makes up 70% of most culture collections. Nereus’ culture collection’s diversity will maximize the chemical diversity in its extracts. As shown in the table below, Nereus has isolated 31 rare genera, which provides enhanced chemical diversity when compared with typical terrestrial collections generally representing no more than 20 genera. The company has also isolated novel organisms with no genetic match or only represented by clones that have, up until now, not been cultured in the laboratory.