Changes to the Access System for the Syngenta Arabidopsis Insertion Library or SAIL (formerly GARLIC) Collection

Please note these important changes to the SAIL access system:

Effective as of January 1, 2004, Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc. (SBI) will no longer be distributing seeds from the SAIL collection to academic researchers. Our system of SAIL access under a Materials Transfer Agreement (MTA) was launched in June 2001. The numbers suggest that the access system has been a great success with the Arabidopsis community. Since that time, under more than 600 executed MTAs, we have filled over 1,000 seed requests from approximately 760 academic requestors at almost 300 different institutions around the world. It is obvious to us from the feedback from SAIL users that the SAIL collection has made a significant contribution to plant research, and results from use of SAIL materials have been included in a large number of scientific publications and conference presentations. The number of seed requests to SBI has tapered off significantly in recent months, and coupled with our limited internal resources for maintaining the collection and the seed distribution system, we felt it was time to make a change to the SAIL access system.

Of the approximately 100,000 lines in the SAIL collection, about 50% are being donated to the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC) in Columbus, OH, so researchers will be able to access these lines directly through the ABRC (http://www.arabidopsis.org/abrc/) in the future. SBI has provided the SAIL seed for this set of lines to the ABRC. The sequence information for the donated SAIL lines has been deposited into GenBank and provided to Joe Ecker at the Salk Institute to enter into his public site for finding Arabidopsis mutants (http://signal.salk.edu/cgi-bin/tdnaexpress).

The remaining 50% of the lines will be kept at SBI. Any lines that have been requested under an MTA since the access system was launched in June 2001 are included in this retained set. We stopped executing new MTAs on December 1, 2003, and as of January 1, 2004, we will no longer be accepting any new seed requests for any lines in this set under the existing MTAs. For anyone who has already requested and received SAIL seed under an MTA, we will keep the MTA in effect and you will be able to continue using those SAIL lines under the MTA. As specified in the MTA, please continue to send to SBI publications for prior review, annual reports and bulked up seed and to notify us of inventions made through use of SAIL materials.

We sincerely appreciate the interest you, our academic colleagues, have shown in the SAIL collection and apologize for any inconvenience these changes to the SAIL access system might cause.

About the SYNGENTA SAIL Collection

SAIL is an insertion collection which has been generated from approximately 100,000 individual T-DNA mutagenized Arabidopsis plants (Columbia ecotype). A modified approach to Thermal Asymmetric Interlaced-Polymerase Chain Reaction (TAIL-PCR) was adopted to rescue left border flanking sequences from these plants. In the modification, degenerate primers were pooled together, and amplification was reduced to two of the normal three rounds. TAIL products from each individual plant were sequenced and assembled into a database. Analysis of the left border shows that over 65% of the reactions yielded single and multiple insertion sequence tags, with the remainder giving T-DNA only sequence. The average number of T-DNA inserts per line is 1.5 to 2.0.

The typical TAIL PCR border sequence from each plant is over 300 nucleotides in length and often contains sequence from two separate TAIL products. There are over 116,000 sequenced TAIL-PCR reactions representing more than 98,000 lines. We estimate that the sequence tag database contains at least 70,000 insertion sequence tags that lie within annotated genes or their promoters. The database is formatted to search for insertions in genes of interest by BLAST. BLAST results point researchers to individual seed vials, avoiding lengthy analysis of pools.

View the list of SAIL lines donated to ABRC.
View the list of SAIL lines retained at Syngenta.
Although they are not included in this list, all lines with a plate name beginning in "R" (i.e. R10_A11) have been retained at SBI.

Reference:

Sessions A, Burke E, Presting G, Aux G, McElver J, Patton D, Dietrich B, Ho P, Bacwaden J, Ko C, Clarke JD, Cotton D, Bullis D, Snell J, Miguel T, Hutchison D, Kimmerly B, Mitzel T, Katagiri F, Glazebrook J, Law M, Goff SA. (2002) A high-throughput Arabidopsis reverse genetics system. Plant Cell 14, 2985-94.