Development and timeline of GABI-Kat 

GABI-Kat was initiated at the Max-Planck-Institute of Plant Breeding Research (Cologne, Germany) in the year 1999 and the work started in June 2000. The initial PI's were Bernd Weisshaar, Koen Dekker, Bernd Reiss and Heinz Saedler, and funding was provided by BMBF/PTJ through the GABI programme. By building on experience from the ZIGIA project which centred on transposons for insertional mutagenesis in A. thaliana (see Dekker et al., 2003; BIOTECHNOLOGIA 4:9-31), selection, growth and leaf harvest for DNA extraction from about 90,000 single T-DNA-transformed lines was completed around February 2006. Within GABI-2, the project was continued to moderately increase the number of lines to be analysed (within GABI-1 it was 70,000), to further improve the quality of the mutant population, and to continue to serve the arabidopsis community with providing confirmed insertion lines.

At the end of December 2006, the project was moved from MPIZ Cologne to Bielefeld University (Chair of Genome Research, Bernd Weisshaar) where GABI-Kat started on the 1st of January 2007. At the same time, the project was extended until December 2008. The main focus of this extension was to transfer more lines to NASC, and to confirm all lines that contain insertions in genes that are not hit in other populations.

At the end of 2008, there was first a continuation of the running grant until June 2009, and then an extension of the project until June 2011. The goal is to confirm additional lines and transfer them to NASC. In parallel, the community service continues and the FST collection should be re-annotated with up-to-date data from TAIR.

In 2011, there was first a continuation of the running grant until December 2011, and then an extension of the project until June 2014. New FSTs that had been generated from low-coverage parts of the collection and re-annotation of all existing FSTs allowed to extend the number of predicted insertions. The community service continues.