Laboratory Home Page
Arabidopsis thaliana - What is it?
Arabidopsis thaliana.is a small flowering plant which is widely used by plant science researchers as a model organism to study plant
developmental processes. It is a member of the Brassicaceae family, like
cabbage and radish. Unlike those species, however, it has no major
agronomic importance. A. thaliana does have several advantages for
the researcher however. These include, among others, a small genome
size (a haploid content of around 100 Mbp of DNA which is distributed
among five chromosomes), a rapid life cycle (about 5 weeks from seed
to seed), easy cultivation in restricted space, prolific seed
production, and a large number of mutant stocks that are available for
researchers from the stock centers at Ohio State
University USA and
Nottingham UK.
Why look for genes in this plant?
Because of the characteristics noted above, A. thaliana has become the model organism for studying plant genes. In fact, many genes have already been identified in this organism using the same cDNA library that is used in this laboratory project
(Newman et al. 1994).
There are many genes which are similar in all plants and the study of genes in a model organism like A. thaliana facillitates our understanding of gene expression and function in all plants. Furthermore, since animals and plants are both eukaryotes, many of the genes found in A. thaliana have homologs in animals (like us, for instance). Cool, no?
