3 ms·
It is often a model organism in plant studies, similar to mice in drug discovery. Mostly because it has a quick growth time, is fairly hardy, and just the fact
by siver_john 4y ago
It is often a model organism in plant studies, similar to mice in drug discovery. Mostly because it has a quick growth time, is fairly hardy, and just the fact it has been so well studied means that a lot is known about it.
I am not a plant biologist but have talked to some and I've often seen it used in their work and this was their given reasons.
- jdale27 4y agoThis is all true, plus as the sibling post mentioned its small genome size. The complete genome sequence is about 125 million base pairs, coincidentally around the same size as the other model organisms Drosophila and C. elegans, and only about 10x larger than brewer's yeast (S. cerevisiae). Interestingly I'm not sure if this was known when they started using it, since IIRC Arabidopsis was commonly used even before DNA was confirmed to be the genetic material in the 1940s. I worked in one of the labs that did the original sequencing and annotation of the Arabidopsis genome, and I can confirm that it was useful to be able to open the complete genome sequence file in an Emacs buffer without my Sun pizza box workstation breaking a sweat.