D744 Nucleic Acids Research, 2010, Vol. 38, Database issue materials and simplifying and expediting the receipt of materials by users. Although much of these eﬀorts focus on the mechanical acts of storage, retrieval and prepara- tion of samples for shipment, the PSI-MR has found that the greatest frustrations and longest delays in material transfer come from the time it takes to negotiate and obtain the necessary institutional signatures for material transfer agreements (MTAs). Historically, legal agreements governing the distribu- tion, use or publication of biological materials were used only for material transfers involving industry (1). The emergence of spin-out biotechnology companies and industry funding of academic labs in the 1970s started to blur the lines between academia and industry. The passage of the Bayh–Dole Act in 1980, which encouraged universities to seek intellectual property (IP) protection and licenses, introduced rich new revenue sources for universities placing further importance on monitoring research materials developed using federal funding (2,3). However, an unintended consequence was the increased necessity to couple the transfer of biological materials with MTAs (4). Even when there are no IP issues, most academic institutions use MTAs to accompany all transfers due to the other functions of MTAs (5,6). Speciﬁcally, MTAs outline liability, set distribution limitations, deﬁne appro- priate usage of the material and ensure that proper credit is attributed to the materials’ source. And, fundamentally, an MTA provides a written record of the terms of a transfer. However, the current methods for approving MTAs, which involve numerous people and steps, are prone to delays caused by seeking mutually agreeable language (7). Even without disagreement in the language or terms of the MTA, each step requires an institutional represen- tative to review the paperwork and make a decision, a step that is at the mercy of that individual’s busy schedule. In the worst case, negotiation of the MTA ends without an agreement, necessitating either a waste of resources to reproduce what could have been readily obtained or aban- donment of the experimental approach altogether. Several eﬀorts have sought to streamline the material transfer process by using standardized language (8) (www .hhmi.org/about/research/sc330F.xls and http://scien- cecommons.org/projects/licensing/) or software automa- tion to expedite the delivery and acceptance of MTAs. However, neither of these eﬀorts has been widely adopted, and when used, they are still prone to negotiations and bureaucratic delays. Furthermore, nothing has been developed that successfully allows fast transfers of materials between academic and industry laboratories (9). It is in this context that we developed a revolutionary method that eliminates delays due to MTAs, the Expedited Process MTA (EP-MTA). This process, described here, has been incorporated into the ordering process of all plasmids on DNASU, and has signiﬁcantly reduced the amount of time it takes for researchers to obtain PSI plasmids. Homo sapiens Saccharomyces cerevisiae Bacillus anthracis Vibrio cholerae Francisella tularensis Yersinia pestis Pseudomonas aeruginosa Mus musculus Thermotoga maritime Other species (429) Empty vectors (no insert) Total No. of plasmids (vectors) 34 670 (82) 17 053 (15) 9883 (2) 7464 (4) 4752 (3) 3968 (1) 2419 (6) 2341 (32) 1358 (6) 13 109 (59) 50 97 017 (289) Table 1. Clones and genes currently represented in DNASU DATABASE DESCRIPTION Database design The PSI-MR database and distribution website, DNASU (http://dnasu.asu.edu), is based upon the previously described Plasmid Information Database (PlasmID) (10). Brieﬂy, DNASU/PlasmID comprises an Oracle-based relational database as the data storage layer, a suite of Java modules hosted by an application server as the business logic layer and a web-based presentation layer. DNASU and PlasmID store each plasmid as a clone that is composed of a vector plus an insert. This normalized structure avoids storage of duplicate informa- tion for families of clones that share the same vector or insert. Additional annotation includes associated insert sequence, vector maps and sequence (when available), growth conditions, selectable marker(s), tags, mutations, publications, plasmid depositors, and instructions for dis- tribution, which are stored and searchable in DNASU and PlasmID. Database content The PSI-MR sequence validates, annotates, stores and distributes the plasmids created by PSI researchers since its inception in 2000, of which 16 000 are already available through DNASU. Moreover, DNASU stores and distributes a nearly 100 000 plasmids with inserts from 439 organisms in 289 vector backbones (summarized in Table 1). This includes nearly complete genomic collections of clones from Saccharomyces cerevisiae (11), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (12), Bacillus anthracis, Francisella tularensis (13), Vibrio cholorae (14) and Yersinia pestis, human and mouse genes from the ORFeome collaboration (15), and various plasmids from other researchers DNASU query features DNASU and its parent database PlasmID were originally developed with four basic search options: (i) Gene identiﬁer, which queries the database ﬁrst by species and then by (a) gene symbol (b) Genbank Accession number or (c) Gene ID