Private support helps public plant research
Wednesday, August 4, 2010 - 10:21
in Mathematics & Economics
The private sector and an Austrian research institute are chipping in to help support one of the most widely used public biological databases in the world. Although the majority of funding continues to come from the National Science Foundation, The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR) database is now receiving support from other organizations as well. Almost 40,000 researchers worldwide use it monthly to study everything from crop engineering and alternative energy sources to human disease. Although Arabidopsis thaliana is an experimental plant, it shares many of its genes and basic biological processes with other species of plants and animals including humans.