AIS Wildtype Populations of Arabidopsis

Arabidopsis thaliana L. Heynh., Brassicaceae, is now popular as a model plant for studies of not only molecular biology, but also genetics, plant physiology and developmental biology. There have been three stock-centers of Arabidopsis in the world, which provide the stocks to researchers who want to study with this plant. They are Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) at Ohio State University, USA, The Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (NASC) at Nottingham University, UK, and The Sendai Arabidopsis Seed Stock Center (SASSC) at Miyagi University of Education, Japan. SASSC has been established at Prof.N. Goto's lab. in Miyagi University of Education on 1993. The seed stocks in SASSC are composed of the stocks collected by Prof. A. R. Kranz, The Arabidopsis Information Service (AIS), Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and those accumulated by Prof. N. Goto. The SASSC has maintained 1119 unique lines of Arabidopsis and related species: From AIS Collection, 265 ecotypes, 176 form-, 321 color-, and 14 metabolic-mutants, 106 gene-marker lines, 23 trisomic lines, 12 other species of Arabidopsis genus; From Sendai Collection, 202 lines including ecotypes (mainly from Japanese regions), mutants isolated by Prof. Goto, mutants donated by Prof. M.Koornneef, Wageningen Aricultural University, The Netherlands, and other species in Brassica family in West-Himalayan region provided by Dr. J. I. Mirza, B. Z. University, Pakistan,and in Japan. In 2001, SASSC and RIKEN BioResource Center (BRC) started collaboration work on the maintenance of SASSC seed stocks. From October 2003, RIKEN BRC takes over the preservation and distribution project of this famous resource center and starts distribution of SASSC seeds under the National Bioresource Project supported by Japanese government.