NASC

NASC now maintains over 500,000 accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana (and a small number of other related species).

Characterised lines

Stocks include over 200 well-characterised hormone, flowering, biochemical, form mutants and multiple marker lines, many of which were received from Maarten Koornneef. We also stock several hundred form and colour mutants as well as 300 ecotypes donated by Professor Kranz. Our total of ecotypes representing a reservoir of natural variation, now stands at ~1300 bulk (original collection) and single seed 'purified' lines.

Mapping populations

For mapping purposes we stock:

• 300 recombinant inbred lines derived from a cross between Landsberg erecta and Columbia, donated by Caroline Dean and Clare Lister.
• A set of 146 recombinant inbreds produced from a cross between Wassileweskija and W100F and donated by Pablo Scolnik.
• A population of Cvi-0 (Cape Verde Islands) x Landsberg erecta lines (162 in total) developed by Maarten Koornneef.
• A population of Nd (Niederzenz) x Columbia (100 lines) developed by Eric Holub, Jim Beynon, and Ian Crute (HRI Wellsbourne, UK).
• A population generated from a cross between Landsberg and Columbia quartet mutants qrt1-1 and qrt1-2

Insertion lines

NASC stocks a large number of T-DNA and transposon insertion lines which can be used for both forward and reverse genetics.

Several large novel populations of transgenic material have been released by NASC. These can be used traditionally in forward screens and gene expression analysis, but now, with the complete released sequence that has been generated by the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI), these materials come into their own as tools for reverse genetics.

Ken Feldmann has provided visible mutants and uncharacterised pools of seeds from 6500 TDNA transformed lines. In addition we have available many more TDNA Lines donated by Csaba Koncz and characterised at NASC. Other TDNA lines include the promoter trap lines from Keith Lindsey and from Syngenta (previously Zeneca Mogen).

We also have many thousand GUS enhancer trap lines from Georges Pelletier (INRA Versailles, France); from Thomas Jack (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, USA); from Detlef Weigel (The Salk Institute, La Jolla, USA); and Patrick Gallois (Perpignan, France). In addition we have GFP (Green Fluorescent Protein) enhancer trap lines from Jim Haseloff (Cambridge, UK); and GFP fusions from David Ehrhardt.

Also now available are some very large populations: the Sainsbury Laboratory Arabidopsis Transformants (SLAT) lines (Jonathan Jones, Sainsbury Laboratories, UK); Joe Ecker's SALK population; the Arabidopsis Knockout Facility (AKF) lines from Mike Sussman; and the Syngenta Arabidopsis Insertion Library (SAIL) lines from Syngenta.

Many thanks to all of the researchers who have donated material to NASC. We are always happy to receive new donations. If you would like to donate stocks to NASC, please fill in the donation form and send your seeds to NASC.