It is based in the School of Biosciences at the University of Nottingham's Sutton Bonington Campus, in the English county of Nottinghamshire.

Newly generated research stocks, mutants or lines of Arabidopsis thaliana are donated as samples to NASC where they are maintained and thus are made available to scientists worldwide.

NASC's activities are coordinated with those of the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center, (ABRC) based at Ohio State University, USA.

[3] Stock numbers held at NASC/ABRC in the 1990s then increased steadily by many hundreds mainly due to new technologies of mass transformation (e.g. seed transformation by Ken Feldmann, University of Arizona); but also due to many new mutagenesis programs encouraged by the development of Arabidopsis as a major model organism accompanied by generous donations of seed from many international members of the community.

In 1999 NASC received a large influx of thousands of stocks generated through T-DNA transformation and donated by Pelletier and Bechtold from INRA.