SAG provides living cultures of algae primarily for research purpose, but also for education and environmental applications. The culture strains are available for use by all interested individuals and organisations. As an important service culture collection, the SAG dispatches around 2000 cultures per year (1700 in 2016). Customers are scientists worldwide from various types of institutions, industry, environmental research agencies. About half of the orders within Germany are from Universities for teaching purposes. The SAG is part of the Georg-August University of Göttingen, which covers all staff costs and provides culture rooms and laboratories, but the running costs of the collection are exclusively financed by the dispatch of culture strains.
“The roles of culture collections are pivotal to the ability of the scientific community to undertake high quality science. They provide consistency and quality, traceable source material and information. In addition, they provide a store of well characterized diversity for research and/or exploitation. Without collections, comparative research on cultures is at best problematic and in many cases impossible. Worldwide there are hundreds of algal collections in specialized laboratories and institutes. However, it is the major service collections that form the “backbone” of the curatorial and service roles for the phycological community as a whole.” (J.G. Day)