During 1996, 2254 seed samples were supplied in response to 295 requests. Of these, a total of 53 requests were received from 19 foreign countries. Approximately three fourths of our requests were received by electronic mail or through our order form on the World-Wide Web.

Approximately 5 acres of nursery were grown this summer. Although early rains delayed planting, growing conditions were nearly optimal, and with modest supplemental irrigation we obtained good increases of numerous stocks that were in low supply and new stocks from the collections of Robert Brawn, Nina Fedoroff, Barbara McClintock, Gerry Neuffer, Marcus Rhoades, Donald Robertson and others. Special plantings were made of several categories of stocks, with special attention given to the vast collection of mutants that we are in the process of receiving from Dr. Neuffer. We had a much improved winter nursery at the USDA facility in Isabella, Puerto Rico compared to the previous year. Unfortunately, the USDA's winter nursery program was discontinued and we will be growing our winter nursery this year for the first time at the Illinois Crop Improvement Association's facilities in Juana Díaz, Puerto Rico.

Greenhouse sandbench plantings were made to determine or confirm genotypes relative to seedling traits. Field plantings were also grown to develop pedigree information with regard to mature plant traits. Such information is used to determine or verify genetic constitutions of sources used to perpetuate stocks and supply seed requests.

We have obtained additional stocks from the collections of Marc Albertsen, Jack Beckett, Vicki Chandler, Ed Coe, Nina Fedoroff, Michael Freeling, Jerry Kermicle, Bob Lambert, John Laughnan, Gerry Neuffer, Donald Robertson, Don Shaver, Virginia Walbot, and others. We expect to receive additional large accessions of stocks from Gerry Neuffer and other maize geneticists within the upcoming year.

During the early years of maize genetics, it was common practice to maintain different mutant alleles of a locus without designating the alleles or keeping them separate, especially if there were no visible phenotypic differences. Many single gene mutant stocks were maintained this way at the Stock Center. This year, extensive pedigree searches were made for each source envelope for the stocks for which multiple alleles were known or suspected to exist, and the alleles were separated and given unique stock numbers. The glossy stocks were the most extensively affected by these changes. Furthermore, many bad sources of glossy6 were discovered and the stocks either discarded or pulled aside for allelism testing. Authenticated sources of gl6 will continue to be provided.

We set up a WWW home page in March of 1995 that allows us to receive requests over the 'Web' from users with software such as Mosaic, Internet Explorer or Netscape. We are continuing to enter data into our internal database. We have also been continuing our collaboration with Ed Coe's efforts in the growing Maize Genome Database (MaizeDB). Up-to-date information about our stocks is presently in MaizeDB. A list of available stocks will continue to be published annually as part of the Maize Genetics Cooperation € Newsletter.

Marty Sachs              Philip Stinard                Janet Day Jackson
Director                     Curator                          Senior Research Specialist

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