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 Brassica 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.
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