Jackie Caradonio/Daily Texan Staff Jerry Brand, a research professor in molecular cell and developmental biology, holds up a culture of dasycladales, a type of algae. The University's algae collection is one of the largest in the world, containing more than 2,300 strains and 1,500 to 2,000 species. [Click to enlarge]

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."

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