The small flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana, a member of the mustard family, has become the model system for plant biology. Its unique features allow it to be applied to a wide variety of research problems, including plant physiology, the molecular genetic study of organ development, and plant-pathogen interactions. The importance of Arabidopsis to plant biology is increasing with the international development of germplasm and DNA stock resource centers, genetic and physical maps and their techniques, plus expressed sequence tag and genomic sequencing projects. Furthermore, because flowering plants evolved recently, characterizing a gene in Arabidopsis often simplifies the isolation of a corresponding gene in another flowering plant. The primary mission of this project is to provide a specialized electronic database that can be used by the scientific community to collect, cross-reference, organize, distribute and maintain the scientific data and their results. The immediate goals are to create an initial prototype database with input from the user community, and to maintain the existing public Arabidopsis database, AAtDB, in the interim. It is expected that the prototype developed under this award will become a basis for the next generation Arabidopsis database that will meet the needs of the researchers for the foreseeable future.
