News

SimpleSearch and our other interactive web tools (weborder, request tracking, etc.) did not work for about 24 hours. The problem has been fixed.

A total of 195 newly confirmed lines have been donated to NASC. These GABI-Kat lines represent 195 T3-sets and 2.831 individual seed bags. At NASC, the individual seed bags are counted as "lines". This is why you will find at the NASC website something like "... to view all 88500 of these lines", although there are only about 6.200 T3-sets of which each represents a single GABI-Kat line.

The presently running GABI-Kat grant will end in December 2008. A proposal to extend until June 2009 has been submitted.

In order to reduce the workload for maintenance, we have stopped using OTRS (see FAQ 33) for coordinating incoming email at info_at_gabi-kat.de. The email address is still functional, but it is now "only" an IMAP mailbox shared by few people that are busy with many things different from reading and answering email.

Since GABI-Kat is operating only because of funding from PTJ / BMBF (German Ministry of Education and Research), GABI-Kat obviously requires an active grant. As you know, such grants have a limited duration. The current grant runs out at the end of 2008. The postdocs that were running the project over many years (Yong Li and Mario Rosso at last - many thanks to both of them!) had to look for new positions. Both have been successful (Yong in April and Mario in July), which means that there is currently no postdoc working for GABI-Kat. This explains why the service has been quite slow recently.

GABI-Kat is running since the year 2000. We will try to get another extension, but ... you know about grant proposals! If there is no extension, we will stop taking new orders in September 2008.

Because a hacker attack to our web server was detected and defended, the server was down for several hours.

We have quite some confirmed lines waiting for delivery. However, since the coming holidays may interfere with international delivery, these seed will be put into the mail in the second week of 2008.

We wish all our users a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, and GREAT phenotypes for the experiments in 2008!

We have released version 23 of the database. Due to the identification of lines that are not viable the total number of lines is slightly reduced (see FAQ 13). Donation of lines to NASC has continued. Now, 5551 confirmed lines are available from the stock center as sets of T3 seed from individual T2 plants. In addition, some lost links between FSTs and line IDs could be repaired. Such "lost links" (wrong assignment of FST to line) are caused by handling errors during the initial steps of line and FST production that require hand work.