The Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (NASC) provides seed and information resources to the International Arabidopsis

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and the wider research community. It is based in the School of Biosciences at the

University of Nottingham , mottoeng = A city is built on wisdom , established = 1798 – teacher training college1881 – University College Nottingham1948 – university status , type = Public , chancellor ...

Sutton Bonington Campus The University of Nottingham operates from four campuses in Nottinghamshire and from two overseas campuses, one in Ningbo, China and the other in Semenyih, Malaysia. The Ningbo campus was officially opened on 23 February 2005 by the then British ...

, in the English county of

Nottinghamshire Nottinghamshire (; abbreviated Notts.) is a landlocked county in the East Midlands region of England, bordering South Yorkshire to the north-west, Lincolnshire to the east, Leicestershire to the south, and Derbyshire to the west. The trad ...

. It holds more than 800,000 different stocks of seed representing nearly a million genotypes and provided a Genechip service from 2002-2013. Newly generated research stocks,

mutant In biology, and especially in genetics, a mutant is an organism or a new genetic character arising or resulting from an instance of mutation, which is generally an alteration of the DNA sequence of the genome or chromosome of an organism. It ...

s or

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s of Arabidopsis thaliana are donated as samples to NASC where they are maintained and thus are made available to scientists worldwide. NASC production glasshouse

Established in 1990 as part of the Plant Molecular Biology initiative of the Agricultural and Food Research Council (AFRC), the Centre is currently funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (

BBSRC Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), and is the largest UK public funder of non-medical bioscience. It predominantly funds scientific res ...

) and the

. The Stock Centre was founded by Dr Bernard Mulligan; Directed from 1991 to 1999 by Dr Mary Anderson and from 1999–present by Prof. Sean Tobias May. NASC's activities are coordinated with those of the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center, (ABRC) based at

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, USA. This facilitates a unified and efficient service for the research community. The stock centres have a distribution agreement. NASC distributes to

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and ABRC distributes to

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. Laboratories in other locations may establish their primary affiliation with either centre. When NASC started in 1990 it inherited hundreds of stocks from the Arabidopsis Information Service (AIS) - Started by Robbelen in 1965 and continued by Burger (1971), Kranz (1978), and Kranz and Kirchheim (1981, 1987), the AIS donated its complement of stocks listed in the 24th edition of the AIS stock book. Stock numbers held at NASC/ABRC in the 1990s then increased steadily by many hundreds mainly due to new technologies of mass transformation (e.g. seed transformation by Ken Feldmann, University of Arizona); but also due to many new mutagenesis programs encouraged by the development of Arabidopsis as a major model organism accompanied by generous donations of seed from many international members of the community. In 1999 NASC received a large influx of thousands of stocks generated through T-DNA transformation and donated by Pelletier and Bechtold from INRA. This was the first of many very large populations that came out of the community and which took the complement of stocks held by the stock centres into the hundreds of thousands. The largest (most populous) seed donations have been th
GABI-kat
lines from Germany ''via'' Bernd Weisshaar; and the SALK lines from Joe Ecker. Between them, these two populations account for more than half of all stocks held by the stock centres today.

References

External links

NASC TweetsNASC (arabidopsis.info)Weedsworld Archive
{{coord missing, Nottinghamshire 1991 establishments in England Arabidopsis thaliana Agricultural organisations based in England Organisations based in Nottingham Rushcliffe Science and technology in Nottinghamshire University of Nottingham