Title:  NSF Awards Large Grant for Arabidopsis Information Resource
Date:   September 29, 1999





Media contact:
September 29, 1999
Cheryl Dybas
NSF PR 99-58
(703) 306-1070/cdybas@nsf.gov

Program contact:
Paul Gilna
(703) 306-1469/pgilna@nsf.gov

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.

-NSF-