The Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committe - MASC

The Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee (MASC) has its origin in the 1990s when scientists from the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia formed an ad hoc committee to promote large-scale studies in Arabidopsis thaliana. During the last two decades this idea of a combined and coordinated effort has proven successful and led to the establishment of Arabidopsis as model organism. Some studies originating from MASC participants were for example sequencing of the Arabidopsis genome, the ORF database, the 1001 genomes initiative, and recently the funding awarded to the Arabidopsis Information Portal (AIP) as new modular and thus highly flexible information resource. The goals of the Arabidopsis researches for the next decade were formulated using MASC as platform in the road map: “From Bench to Bountiful Harvests” (Lavagi, Plant Cell, 2012).

Currently, scientists from 22 countries are involved as country representative in MASC. Furthermore, Arabidopsis researchers organized in six subcommittees work on the fields: Bioinformatics, ORFeomics, Metabolomics, Natural Variation and Comparative Genomics, Phenomics, Proteomics and Systems Biology. MASC members organize and meet during the annual International Conference on Arabidopsis Research (ICAR), which will be held in Vancouver Canada this year (July 28 - Aug 1 2014). The combined efforts of the Arabidopsis community are published in the annual MASC report online during the conference.

If you’re interested in getting more information about MASC or get involved into MASC actions please visit this poster, the ICAR, the Arabidopsis Information Portal session during PAG or the MASC webpages http://www.arabidopsisresearch.org  or http://www.arabidopsis.org/portals/masc/index.jsp.