Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre

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Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Centre (NASC) provides seed and information resources to Arabidopsis researchers around the world. It is part of the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham, based at the Sutton Bonington Campus in Nottinghamshire, England. NASC holds more than 800,000 different seed stocks, representing nearly a million genotypes, and operated a Genechip service from 2002 to 2013. New Arabidopsis thaliana stocks, mutants, or lines are donated to NASC, kept there, and shared with scientists worldwide.

NASC was established in 1990 as part of the Plant Molecular Biology initiative of the AFRC. It is funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and the University of Nottingham. The centre was founded by Dr Bernard Mulligan, directed by Dr Mary Anderson from 1991 to 1999, and since 1999 by Prof. Sean Tobias May. NASC works closely with the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) at Ohio State University, creating a unified service for researchers. They operate a distribution agreement: NASC ships to Europe and ABRC ships to the Americas, with the option for laboratories elsewhere to affiliate with either centre.

At its start, NASC inherited hundreds of stocks from the Arabidopsis Information Service (AIS), which began in 1965. Stock numbers grew through the 1990s thanks to new DNA-change and mutagenesis techniques and many seed donations from researchers worldwide. In 1999 NASC received thousands of stocks from T-DNA transformation donated by Pelletier and Bechtold of INRA. Since then, the collections have continued to expand. The largest donor collections are the GABI-kat lines from Germany and the SALK lines from Joe Ecker, together making up more than half of NASC/ABRC stocks today.