What's New at NASC?

The Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (NASC), based at the University of Nottingham, collects, preserves, reproduces and distributes diverse seed and other stocks of the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana and related species for research and education. Established in April 1991 with British public funding, NASC’s seed collection approaches one million stocks.  NASC’s activities are coordinated with those of the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center, (ABRC) based at Ohio State University, USA. Both stock centres offer several advantages:  they provide security and stability as seed stocks are preserved under the best possible conditions and they maintain and curate large numbers of stocks according to common standards. NASC has traditionally been funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) with a small proportion of operational costs also covered through user fees. This combination of government funding and cost recovery represents a reasonable balance between community services provided and financial support required.  The usage of NASC resources has increased year on year continuously since introducing user fees and has shown a recent acceleration in distribution. The number of seed and DNA stocks sent annually is now over 100,000, a rate that substantially exceeds anything imagined in the beginning. As part of the AIP community, our data are freely available through web services and we are currently expanding our integration with other community resources.