This week, TAIR (The Arabidopsis Information Resource) made the freshly-updated TAIR12 genome annotation the default across all of its tools. 

Thousands of researchers across plant biology, crop science, genetics, pharmacology and other fields rely on TAIR for reliable, centralized genetic data on the Arabidopsis thaliana genome and interactive tools that save researchers time, improve consistency, and accelerate research advancement. With TAIR12 in place, TAIR is now running on the most complete, high quality Arabidopsis genome sequence.

TAIR12 replaces Araport11, first released over ten years ago,  in June 2016. The new annotation incorporates the latest technology advances and research findings to update, correct, and enhance the scientific record with revised gene structures, previously missing genes, improved UTRs, and modern RNA evidence. 

Development and implementation

TAIR12 is the result of a collaborative, global effort by members of the research community. It is the first reannotation developed without grant funding, with the help of more than 100 researchers around the world, who volunteered their time over three years to correct gene boundaries, isoforms, overlapping genes, pseudogenes, and non-coding RNAs.

The reannotation was released on the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in February 2026, and was integrated into TAIR’s popular JBrowse2 toolset over the summer. Now, the conversion process is nearly complete: The TAIR12 annotation is the new default across all TAIR tools and views. The only exception is our SeqViewer tool, which will be updated in a later release.

Araport11 remains accessible, so researchers can easily compare with papers or datasets published between 2016-2025. Gene models are available as obsolete records. JBrowse2 offers dual views of Araport11 and TAIR12. Our sequence tools BLAST and PatMatch default to TAIR12, but allow users to select Araport11 if they wish.

In order to ease the transition, the TAIR curators have developed several resources:

As always, TAIR curators welcome feedback from the user community. Email us about any problems with the new annotation at curator [at] arabidopsis.org. Reports will help improve the next annotation release.