However, the current status and the up-to-date data content of the SimpleSearch database have reached a very comprehensive level through the measures described in this article. ACCESSION NUMBERS About 20 000 FSTs have been submitted to EMBL/ GenBank: FR799760–FR819654. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The authors thank Yong Li, Mario Rosso, the MPI for Plant Breeding Research and all former co-workers for their contribution to GABI-Kat, and Renate Harder, Helene Schellenberg, Nina Schmidt, Andrea Voigt, Marja-Leena Wilke for technical assistance. FUNDING German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the context of the German plant genomics program GABI (Fo¨ rderkennzeichen 0313855). Funding for open access charge: Bielefeld University. Conﬂict of interest statement. None declared. REFERENCES 1. Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (2000) Analysis of the genome sequence of the ﬂowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Nature, 408, 796–815. 2. O’Malley,R.C. and Ecker,J.R. (2010) Linking genotype to phenotype using the Arabidopsis unimutant collection. Plant J., 61, 928–940. Nucleic Acids Research, 2012, Vol. 40, Database issue D1215 3. Swarbreck,D., Wilks,C., Lamesch,P., Berardini,T.Z., Garcia- Hernandez,M., Foerster,H., Li,D., Meyer,T., Muller,R., Ploetz,L. et al. (2008) The Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR): gene structure and function annotation. Nucleic Acids Res., 36, D1009–D1014. 4. Strizhov,N., Li,Y., Rosso,M.G., Viehoever,P., Dekker,K.A. and Weisshaar,B. (2003) High-throughput generation of sequence indexes from T-DNA mutagenized Arabidopsis thaliana lines. BioTechniques, 35, 1164–1168. 5. Rosso,M.G., Li,Y., Strizhov,N., Reiss,B., Dekker,K. and Weisshaar,B. (2003) An Arabidopsis thaliana T-DNA mutagenised population (GABI-Kat) for ﬂanking sequence tag based reverse genetics. Plant Mol. Biol., 53, 247–259. 6. Li,Y., Rosso,M.G., Strizhov,N., Viehoever,P. and Weisshaar,B. (2003) GABI-Kat SimpleSearch: a ﬂanking sequence tag (FST) database for the identiﬁcation of T-DNA insertion mutants in Arabidopsis thaliana. Bioinformatics, 19, 1441–1442. 7. Li,Y., Rosso,M.G., Viehoever,P. and Weisshaar,B. (2007) GABI-Kat SimpleSearch: an Arabidopsis thaliana T-DNA mutant database with detailed information for conﬁrmed insertions. Nucleic Acids Res., 35, D874–D878. 8. Alonso,J.M., Stepanova,A.N., Leisse,T.J., Kim,C.J., Chen,H., Shinn,P., Stevenson,D.K., Zimmerman,J., Barajas,P., Cheuk,R. et al. (2003) Genome-wide insertional mutagenesis of Arabidopsis thaliana. Science, 301, 653–657. 9. Samson,F., Brunaud,V., Duchene,S., De Oliveira,Y., Caboche,M., Lecharny,A. and Aubourg,S. (2004) FLAGdb++: a database for the functional analysis of the Arabidopsis genome. Nucleic Acids Res., 32, D347–D350. 10. Altschul,S.F., Madden,T.L., Schaffer,A.A., Zhang,J., Zhang,Z., Miller,W. and Lipman,D.J. (1997) Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs. Nucleic Acids Res., 25, 3389–3402. 11. Wortman,J.R., Haas,B.J., Hannick,L.I., Smith,R.K. Jr, Maiti,R., Ronning,C.M., Chan,A.P., Yu,C., Ayele,M., Whitelaw,C.A. et al. (2003) Annotation of the Arabidopsis genome. Plant Physiol., 132, 461–468. 12. Bonﬁeld,J.K., Smith,K.F. and Staden,R. (1995) A new DNA sequence assembly program. Nucleic Acids Res., 23, 4992–4999. 13. Staden,R., Beal,K.F. and Bonﬁeld,J.K. (2000) The Staden package, 1998. Methods Mol. Biol., 132, 115–130.