NASC

NASC, the Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (established in 1990), has over 800,000 active germplasm accessions with associated metadata. Most are transgenic mutants annotated with precise genome location for variants including SNPs; insertions and deletions; up- and down-regulated positional tools such as enhancer-, activation-, and promotor- traps; and a range of other genetic tools and modified lines including precision genome-edited substitutions using CRISPR and other techniques. NASC also holds thousands of standard model background lines known colloquially as ecotypes, which vary from the canonical Arabidopsis transgenic backgrounds and are associated with full genome sequence information. All of these are available to search and order online. NASC is arguably the world’s largest single-plant genebank and possesses invaluable experience in maintaining, reproducing and distributing vast collections of true-to-type genotypes and mutants at a rate of over 50,000 distributed lines per year (more than 150,000 in some years).

Role in PRO-GRACE

In PRO-GRACE, NASC wishes to share our mass distribution experiences including process management, stock barcoding and curation of large numbers of lines in association with extensive metadata. We were pioneers in transcriptomics, having produced the very first large plant transcriptomics database (NASCarrays) from data generated in-house. NASC also curated and made available the very first genome browser (of any species) to link together genome and transcriptome data with physical accessions (AtEnsembl). We have a long association with the development and effective instantiation of international transcriptomic and phenotypic standards, as well as being evangelical regarding open data and unequivocal availability of transcriptomic data and physical seed materials. We have a lot of materials and are open and willing to cooperate to find solutions that will allow us to adopt the best approaches for our users with a history of making change happen - including such thorny areas as successful cost recovery.

Main Contacts

Sean May

[email]

Marcos Castellanos-Uribe

[email]