The Norwegian plant transcriptional profiling centre

The Norwegian Arabidopsis Centre (FUGE-NARC) was established as a part of FUGE I. NARC provided national service in plant functional genomics and the service activity was shared between Univeristy of Life Sciences (UMB, transformation/genotyping), Univers ity of Oslo (Y2H, in situ hyb) and Norwegian University of Science and Technology (transcriptional profiling and bioinformatics). NARC as so will not continue as a independent platform, as it was argued from the FUGE board that the activities could be or ganized as nodes connected to e.g. the bioinformatics, proteomics and microarray platforms. The plant community of Norway has strongly argued that it is of outmost importance to continue NARC activities and especially the plant microarray and bioinformati cs part. As shown in annexes to the application a continuation has strong support in the plant research community of Norway both PhDs, post docs, researchers and permanent scientific staff. Funding to this plant array node is dramatically reduced from 24 .5 mill NOK in FUGE I to 2.3 mill NOK in FUGE II. We will, however, try our best to help support and strengthen the quality of basic plant science by taking advantages of the tools available in the Arabidopsis model system and other plant based systems (e .g. oilseed rape). We will build on the general and plant specific competence established in NARC during the FUGE I period (2002-2007). The plant node is organised as a part of the Microarray platform of FUGE and will focus on RNA in and data out using t he Agilent technology platform for DNA microarrays.