NBRP-Plant Databases: Plant Biological Resource Databases in Japan

The National BioResource Project (NBRP: www.nbrp.jp) is a Japanese project to construct the framework for systematic collection, preservation and distribution of biological resources to be utilized as experimental materials in life science researches. NBRP-Plant is a plant subset of NBRP members and it consists of 9 groups such as Arabidopsis, Rice, Wheat, Barley, Algae, Lotus/Glycine, Morning Glory, Chrysanthemum and Tomato. Each group disseminates information on resources with organism-specific features and a total of 2.5 million resources are currently available from the websites.

NBRP–Arabidopsis has been supporting researches by distributing Arabidopsis seeds of wild-type and mutants, DNA materials and cultured cell lines. Oryzabase is a comprehensive rice database housing wild rice accessions, mutants and annotated gene list with literatures. KOMUGI, a wheat database, contains information on Triticum/Aegilops lines, experimental lines, genomic/cDNA clones and a gene catalogue. BarleyDB provides germplasms, core collection, and genomic/cDNA clones. NBRP-Algae houses a diverse collection of algae covering 354 genera and 718 species. A challenge faced by NBRP-Chrysanthemum is to replace cultivated autohexaploidy chrysanthemum with diploid C. seticupse as the model species. Mutant strains with diverse array of variations and DNA clones are a featured collection of NBRP-Morning Glory. As a model plant for legume, NBRP-Lotus japonicas/Glycine soja has been distributing wild accessions, RILs and genomic/cDNA clones. NBRP-Tomato has been distributing Micro-Tom mutants and EST/cDNA clones. SABRE2 (sabre.epd.brc.riken.jp/SABRE2.html) is a database of plant DNA clones available from the core facilities of NBRP-Plant members. NBRP resources are directly accessible from PubMed LinkOut.