TAIR: THE ARABIDOPSIS INFORMATION RESOURCE

¹ The National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) 1800 Old Pecos Trail Santa Fe New Mexico USA 87505

² Carnegie Institution, 260 Panama Street Stanford CA 94305

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) is an NSF-funded project charged with making the rich biological information on Arabidopsis thaliana available to the international scientific community. TAIR is a distributed effort whose primary participants are the Carnegie Institute of Washington Department of Plant Biology located at Stanford University and the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. TAIR (http://www.arabidopsis.org) will expand upon the work of its predecessor, the Arabidopsis thaliana Database (AtDB). TAIR aims to provide a state of the art genomic database to exploit the value of this model species for comparative genomics. Our current efforts are devoted to developing a sound infrastructure based on the following tools: 1) An extensive object-oriented data model spanning the types of data currently in the system and anticipated data such as high-density expressions arrays. The technical robustness and biological accuracy of the data model will support future growth. 2) A map viewer that can compare genetic and physical maps and shows detailed sequence-level features at appropriate scales. Unifying sequence and map data types is a natural implication of complete sequencing. 3) Curation tools and protocols to capture in a structured format valuable information currently only available in print. Future years will see the addition of new datatypes and analysis methods. Our long-term goal is to leverage the depth and quality of Arabidopsis genomic data to the study of all plants.