USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announces new tool to search biotechnology permit data

USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) is announcing that it is launching a new tool on its website to search biotechnology permit and notification data. Currently, the data are available on the APHIS website and a subset of the data is displayed on the Information Systems for Biotechnology (ISB) website, maintained by Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University popularly known as Virginia Tech (VT). Beginning September 15, 2017, the ISB website will no longer contain data for biotechnology permits and notifications issued by APHIS; these data will be available exclusively on the APHIS website.

APHIS has increased its data-managing capability and is bringing this functionality in-house to increase government efficiency, and enhance the user’s experience. The data, which were previously also available on the APHIS website but only in a downloadable spreadsheet format, will now be presented both as a downloadable spreadsheet and in a user-friendly searchable format, similar to what was offered on the ISB site, but will include all regulated activities under permit and notification as well as APHIS-issued Courtesy permits. With the new tool, users will be able to search data by institution, article, action, type, status, state, genotype, and phenotype, as well as by a global search field. APHIS will continue to improve the site by providing improved search functions and visual representations of data in the near future.

The new data search tool is available at: https://www.aphis.usda.gov/biotechnology/check-status. Users who have bookmarked the VT ISB site should change their bookmark to this web address.


If you have any questions or feedback on the new tool, please contact biotechquery@aphis.usda.gov.

Please note that an online archive of VT’s ISB News Reports and the following publications: Practical Guide to Containment: Plant Biosafety in Research Greenhouses; Proceedings of a Workshop on Ecological Effects of Pest Resistance Genes in Managed Ecosystems; and Proceedings of a Workshop on Criteria for Field Testing of Plants with Engineered Regulatory, Metabolic and Signaling Pathways are available at: https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/78421

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