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The world’s most valued plant database faces extinction because its funding is being phased out by the US National Science Foundation (NSF),
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"This is the wrong way to go," says genomics researcher Ernest Retzel of the National Center for Genome Resources in Santa Fe, New Mexico. "I believe it will set the field back."
The NSF says that it does not have a policy to support long term,
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But TAIR director Eva Huala told an international meeting on database and bioresource sustainability, held in Rome on 11 12 November,
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Huala, a member of the Department of Plant Biology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford,
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TAIR also feeds information into other specialist databases,
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Huala’s survey, sent on 4 November to more than 900 TAIR users,
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Respondents said that they would accept a situation in which publicly funded institutions and individuals had free access,
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"As soon as we introduce any form of subscription,
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If TAIR were lost, another free database would inevitably spring up to take its place,
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Huala has put out feelers to other potential funding sources in the United States, and also to other countries, because only around a quarter of TAIR users are US based. "But these are all long shots," she admits. "I am not optimistic."
Along with the Multinational Arabidopsis Steering Committee, which represents Arabidopsis researchers,
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The plight of TAIR is the most recent and most drastic example of funding crises now facing many databases and bioresources,
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