Addgene is dwarfed by nonprofit repositories such as PlasmID and its sibling DNASU. PlasmID, currently home to over 400,000 plasmids, was founded in 2004 by a consortium of Harvard research centers and hospitals, including the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, to share reagents and materials at as low a cost as possible. “We are a cancer research facility, so we have a larger collection of human constructs, but we also have representation from the proteomes of a number of bacteria, yeast, and drosophila,” says Glenn Beeman, scientific liaison. PlasmID was established to handle materials including the ORFeome and Mammalian Gene Collections and positions itself as being the plasmid depot for researchers in large consortiums prepublication.Federal restrictions prohibit PlasmID from using fees from researchers for marketing activities, but it has a small grant from the NCI that helps with ongoing operations. Plasmids are delivered at cost. A 96-well library already arrayed is relatively cheap, but most requests are for custom arrays that are more labor intensive. The highly automated repository filled about 7000 constructs of individual bacterial stocks this year, up from 3000 in 2009. About half of the constructs are NCI distributions, and 25% go overseas.DNASU was founded in 2009 when Dr. Joshua LaBaer, former director of the Harvard Institute of Proteomics and founder of the PlasmID collection, was recruited by Arizona State University; he took most of his collection with him. DNASU distributes over 191,000 plasmids with genes from about 600 organisms as well as over 100 empty vectors that can be used to express these genes in a variety of experimental systems. As the Protein Structure Initiative Biology-Materials Repository (PSI:Biology-MR), they also distribute hundreds of thousands of plasmids created by the NIGMS-funded PSI that is focused on solving three-dimensional atomic-level protein structures.PlasmID and DNASU still share some collections. “We both distribute the ORFeome,” says Catherine Seiler, Ph.D., DNASU scientific liaison. “A lot of what we distribute is from high-throughput cloning projects within our own center that support our protein array technology. We also work with some large grants (such as the PSI) along with publications. It depends what you are looking for according to which repository will have the materials that you want.” Collections at DNASU include over 1,300 plasmids containing glycoenzymes from the University of Georgia to about 350 cystic fibrosis transmembrane conductance regulator (CFTR) plasmids funded by the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. DNASU gets an average of about 140 requests a month and distributed over 100,000 plasmids last year. “We want to provide these resources to researchers quickly, at low cost,” says Seiler. “And people who need something, they don’t have months to wait.”DNASU is collaborating with Lab Genius at Imperial College, which has helped them develop a dynamic vector mapping system and other visual resources, links, and tools to facilitate research. DNASU contains a research lab, the Virginia G. Piper Center for Personalized Diagnostics, and is part of a core facility that includes Next Generation and Sanger sequencing and protein microarray services.“What is important really for a nonprofit, especially one based in a university, is to make sure these materials are available well into the future” says Seiler. “Having a recharge that continuously funds our efforts makes sure we are going to be here and around for the long haul.”DNASU promotes its services at meetings. Its database is linked to UniProt, Labome, and Biocompare and in the near future, to the New England Biolabs (NEB) website. “I’ve found that extraordinary customer service goes a really long way because once people know who you are and the quality of the materials, they are more likely to interact with you and tell other people,” says Seiler.Seiler’s promotional efforts may have worked a little too well. Recently, a suspicious order came through—somebody using a false identity from a national lab was trying to purchase their plasmids and resell them on the black market. Working with ASU’s lawyers, Seiler was able to quash the plot, which just goes to show that plasmids are, indeed, a hot commodity.