The Plant Cell Culture Library
A living reference collection of plant cell lines maintained at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture.
Our mission
The PCCL preserves and characterizes plant cell lines, held in live culture and cryopreservation, as a resource for cellular-agriculture and plant-science research. Alongside the living cultures we document media formulations, taxonomy, and reported bioactivity so lines can be sourced, reproduced, and cited.
Our history
The Plant Cell Culture Library began in the 1990s as a collection assembled by Phytera, Inc. for anti-infective drug discovery (McAlpine et al., 1999). Through a series of mergers it passed to Monsanto, which donated it to the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2014 as an open research resource.
In 2025, UMass Amherst and Tufts agreed that the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture would take on the whole collection, and it has since moved to Tufts, where the Center keeps it for researchers in academia and industry. Lines kept their Culture IDs through the move, so a Culture ID cited in earlier work still leads to its line here.
Citing the collection
Cite the collection as: Plant Cell Culture Library (PCCL) (RRID:SCR_016784). An RRID is a Research Resource Identifier, which many journals ask authors to give. The registry's record for this RRID still links the collection's former address at UMass Amherst; it is being updated.
To cite a medium, use the address its page gives under "Cite this medium". Each line and species page keeps its address, so a link to one keeps working.
Support the collection
Keeping a living library going (subculturing, cryobanking and characterization) is ongoing work. Gifts and sponsorships help keep lines alive and accessible to the research community. To discuss supporting the PCCL or a gift agreement, get in touch below.
Contact
Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA), Medford, Massachusetts.
Email cellag@tufts.edu for culture requests, collaborations, and gifts.
This site
Designed and built by:
- Matt McNulty, PCCL Project Manager
- Benji Bromberg, Website design and development; webmaster
- Nora Redding, Website design