Proven Value for Plant Biologists

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) is an online database of genetic and molecular biology data for Arabidopsis thaliana, a key reference plant. It is an indispensable resource for Arabidopsis researchers. TAIR was established in 1999 and continues to provide the most comprehensive and current set of plant gene function data. Plant biologists working with both Arabidopsis and other plants use TAIR because the comprehensive information available for Arabidopsis is often directly relevant to other plant species. Every year, over 3,000 Arabidopsis research articles and 5,000 experiment-based annotations are added to this database.

Resources

Phoenix maintains several resources for the TAIR community, including a community portal that includes updates, training materials, and curated sets of bioinformatics and data resources that havebeen compiled by members of the International Arabidopsis Informatics Consortium (IAIC) and curators at TAIR.

Pricing

Depositing data into TAIR is absolutely free, as is accessing basic content. Subscribe to TAIR to access curated content or to use TAIR’s data visualization and analysis tools (see pricing table below). Whether you are conducting Arabidopsis research or need complete, current and reliable genome reference for other plant species, TAIR has the best data available.

FAQs

The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) is an online database of genetic and molecular biology data for the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. TAIR is considered an indispensable resource for thousands of researchers around the world who work with Arabidopsis. TAIR is also commonly used by plant biologists working with other plants because the amount of information available for Arabidopsis is vast compared with most other plants and the research results from Arabidopsis are often directly relevant to other plant species.

Arabidopsis thaliana is an important reference plant for the plant kingdom. Because of its small physical size, short life cycle and small genome, it was adopted as the standard laboratory organism for the study of higher plants and its genome sequence was completed in 2000. Many fundamental research questions about plants have been studied in Arabidopsis in great detail, such as how plants grow, reproduce, sense their environment and adapt to it. Approximately 4000 new research articles on Arabidopsis are published every year.

TAIR is a database of knowledge about Arabidopsis, contributed by researchers or extracted from (and linked back to) research articles by biocurators with graduate or postdoctoral training as plant biology researchers. The information is presented in a highly integrated and standardized format for efficient querying and use in large scale data analyses. Searches within TAIR are not bibliographic searches; they search the accumulated knowledge about Arabidopsis directly, with links to the articles from which the information was gathered.

We use Google Analytics to track the number of visits to TAIR from each instititution. A visit is a series of pages accessed by one visitor. One visit can include one or more TAIR pages accessed from the same computer, and the visit ends when the visitor leaves the TAIR website or is inactive for 30 minutes or more. The total number of visits from an institution over the previous year (September 1 – August 31) is used to set the subscription price for the following year. Please contact us for the TAIR usage from your institution.

There are many different sites that display Arabidopsis data. TAIR produces gene function annotation data through its own curation effort by professional curators and by collecting data directly from authors through a TAIR-journal collaboration. As a data provider, we share data with resources after the data have been in TAIR for one year, which means that the TAIR data you see at these other sites is at least a year out of date. Types of data that we add continuously to TAIR include gene function information, gene symbols, alleles and mutant phenotypes, publications, and gene expression pattern. In addition, our expert curators are easily accessible via our Helpdesk, and will happily provide customized datasets to subscribers upon request.

Yes! Off-campus access is possible if you are able to provide us with the IP address(es) for your institution’s proxy server when you subscribe. However, Phoenix Bioinformatics is not able to support Shibboleth or other single-sign-on technologies at this time.

We offer 1-month free trials to institutions considering a TAIR subscription. If you are a librarian or other individual with purchasing privileges, please contact us and we’d be happy to provide you with a quote and free trial.

Many of our subscribers use EZ-Proxy for their off-campus access.

If you are a subscriber and need our configuration stanza, it is as follows:

U http://www.arabidopsis.org
HJ www.arabidopsis.org
DJ arabidopsis.org

U http://seqviewer.arabidopsis.org
HJ seqviewer.arabidopsis.org
DJ seqviewer.arabidopsis.org

U http://gbrowse.arabidopsis.org
HJ gbrowse.arabidopsis.org
DJ gbrowse.arabidopsis.org

U https://arabidopsis.org
U https://www.arabidopsis.org
U https://seqviewer.arabidopsis.org
U https://gbrowse.arabidopsis.org

Testimonials

“The world’s most valued plant database”

Nature (2009) 462, 258-259

“TAIR saved me three months of map-based cloning work due to its morphological phenotype database.”

Dr. Christopher DeFraia, The Ohio State University, USA

“The huge datasets provided by TAIR really help us doing bioinformatics analysis of small RNAs in Arabidopsis.”

Yijun Meng, Department of Bioinformatics, Zhejiang University, China

“TAIR is *the* resource for plant scientists like me involved in both experimental and computational work…. Rarely does a day go by when I don’t use TAIR. It is a clear model for web resource for other plants.”

Dr. Arjun Krishnan, Princeton University, USA

“TAIR has been a critical tool in every project and stage of my scientific development; from grad student to post-doc to PI. The TAIR resource is invaluable not only in Arabidopsis systems, but as an annotation and comparative tool in plant biology. I highly recommend TAIR.”

Dr. Shai Lawit, A Leading Agricultural Biotech Company