October 6, 2006

Dear Users of the Maize TILLING Project,

     Over the past couple of years the community has been tremendously supportive of our efforts to provide point mutant alleles for use in functional genomics and gene characterization. We will continue to improve and expand our ability to return more alleles to you and seed carrying those alleles for your research with shorter turnaround. Recently, we have improved the mutation density in the populations we TILL and have added Eco-TILLING of the Maize Diversity Lines to inform users about natural variation in their genes of interest.

     An essential component in our project has been NSF funding over the past few years as we got MTP established and running. One part of that support has been to subsidize the ~$3000 cost of TILLING a gene target so that the user fee we have to charge could remain low as we introduced this technology to the community. The goal all along has been that NSF would eventually remove these price supports once the community began using the facility and user fees could support our operations. This is the same approach that has been taken for the Seattle TILLING Project, which is now operating busily without NSF support.

     Our recently renewed funding was contingent on our becoming fully self-sufficient by the end of our current award (Aug 14, 2008). MTP operations are much more sustainable and the impact on your budgets easier to handle if we phase these increases in gradually. We will therefore be raising the fee we charge for TILLING in maize to $1500 per target, effective January 1, 2007. Please note that this fee will now include Eco-TILLING 48 Maize Diversity Lines and we will continue our policy of screening until we have satisfied our delivery algorithm. In an effort to make these price increases as easy as possible on the community, the NSF funding we have allows us to raise the price gradually $500-750 per year for the next several years. Certainly, if there is more demand for our services than we anticipate, we can adjust these increases accordingly, with the clear goal to keep the price to users as low as possible for as long as possible.

     We appreciate your understanding and support of the project, and look forward to continuing our service to the functional genomics efforts of the community.

Sincerely,

The Maize TILLING Project