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The CBS Culture Collection (1904), is the largest public service collection for living fungi in the world. CBS and other established fungal collections harbour a great hidden diversity that, within a relatively small time frame, can most effectively be surveyed by a DNA barcoding approach. CBS has therefore acquired funding to generate DNA barcodes of its entire collection. Faced with a great diversity of undescribed and cryptic taxa, taxonomic types have the prominent function of anchoring existing species names. Taxonomic type sequence information is rare, because few types have to date been subjected to DNA sequencing. The barcode sequences of the more than 8000 ex-type cultures will be of tremendous value for fungal taxonomy and its user community. Furthermore, the CBS yeast collection holds almost 9000 strains including the 2240 ex-type strains of all described species. The resulting barcode data set will be an invaluable reference source for yeast research. For more than 100 years, strains entering the CBS collections have been identified based on state-of-art techniques at the time of accession. DNA barcoding the holdings will allow to update identifications and to recognize strains in need of further research, which will not only increase the value of the collection, but will aid the user community. The DNA barcoding approach and online database identification tool will also prove invaluable to confirm the identity of strains selected for whole genome analysis.<p><p>Keywords: