CSBR: Living Stocks: Enhancing the Quality and Efficiency of the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center

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The Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) was established in 1991 with the mission to collect, preserve, propagate and distribute diverse resources of Arabidopsis thaliana and related species. The Center has been serving the dynamically changing needs of the scientific community that uses Arabidopsis for research, and has grown to serve more than 27,000 investigators worldwide. The collection of almost one million stocks comprises seed, DNA, protein and cell culture stocks, as well as educational materials. With over 200,000 samples distributed annually, ABRC provides an essential service to the plant research community involved in understanding the basic processes in plant models, and ultimately leading to applications to accelerate crop improvement.In the next three years the Center will: 1) continue to enlarge and expand the collections of resources based on projected demand, including antibodies and DNA resources from other species; 2) procure, store and distribute novel types of resources as they are developed and driven by the needs of the community; 3) continue to increase the efficiency of the operation, thus providing higher quality of service without a budget increase; 4) continue developing partnerships with Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (arabidopsis.info) and the Arabidopsis Information Portal (www.araport.org) in order to provide online access to stock information and ordering; and 5) continue to expand the role of ABRC as a resource for education and outreach by developing new K-12 hands-on programs and by increasing the reach of the existing K-12 and college-level teaching activities. The updated procedures for stock handling and maintenance, along with the quality control protocols and statistics, can be found online (abrc.osu.edu). Education materials are also available online (abrcoutreach.osu.edu), including the detailed information about education kits.