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NSF PR 99-58 - September 29, 1999
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NSF Awards Large Grant for Arabidopsis Information
Resource
$5.3-Million Award Will Boost
Understanding of Plant Genetics
By the end of next year, scientists will likely know
the entire genetic makeup of the Arabidopsis thaliana
plant, a mustard that is closely related to many food
plants and used as a model for all aspects of plant
biology. Availability of so much data about this plant
-- the first to be completely sequenced - will be
a significant step toward understanding the biology
of all plants and improving agriculturally important
crops such as corn, soybeans and rice.
To make best use of these data, the National Science
Foundation (NSF) has awarded a five-year, $5.3 million
grant to the Arabidopsis thaliana Information Resource
(TAIR) project, a joint venture of the Carnegie Institution
of Washington's (D.C.) Department of Plant Biology
located at California's Stanford University and the
National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa
Fe, New Mexico (which is receiving a sub-award).
"NSF is committed to delivering a comprehensive information
resource to the international Arabidopsis research
community," says Paul Gilna, program director in NSF's
division of biological infrastructure. "This award
will allow for the development of an increased ability
to respond quickly to user community needs."
The NSF grant will support a new, publicly accessible
database, TAIR, which will contain all the information
about the Arabidopsis genome project and experimental
data from literature to facilitate the analysis and
interpretation of the plant's genetic makeup. There
is a direct link between most, if not all, genes of
the model plant and those of 250,000 other plant species,
including commercially important ones. Arabidopsis,
however, is easier to study because it has a highly
compact genome, with about a third the amount of DNA
as rice, for example. TAIR will allow researchers
to compare the DNA sequences of other plants to those
whose functions are known in Arabidopsis to determine
what role the genes in the other plants may play.
This, in turn, could hasten understanding of how to
use plant genetics to increase productivity, bolster
resistance to disease and optimize other desirable
traits in the hundred or so commercially important
plant species.
"We will be developing a comprehensive database of
Arabidopsis data with broad applications," says biologist
Chris Somerville of Carnegie. "Because the value of
Arabidopsis is its utility in understanding other
plants, our goal is to build a structure that permits
us to link information about Arabidopsis to all other
plants, and vice versa."
Adds Sue Rhee, director of TAIR, "With the explosion
of genomic data and the diversity of data types and
methods, biologists are in need of new ways of obtaining
and analyzing data. TAIR will address this critical
need by providing integrated and value-added data
in an industry-standard database environment." The
user-friendly resource, which will be available at
a Web site hosted by NCGR, will feature an intuitive,
object-oriented program that will use a common vocabulary,
have visualization tools and allow information retrieval
queried from any perspective.
The new database will replace the current Arabidopsis
database gradually and incrementally, with the release
of the preliminary version of the new database on
January 15, 2000. A first version of TAIR, with new
data and displays, will be released September 1, 2000.
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