Arabidopsis thaliana
Arabidopsis thaliana (common Thale cress) is a small weed which has been chosen as the primary model organism for studying plant molecular genetics.[1]
The features which make the plant a suitable model organism include;
- Large supply of the plants available
- Fully sequenced genome (roughly 140 million nucleotide pairs)
- Production of thousands of offspring per plant after 8-10 weeks
- Use of mutagenic chemicals to produce mutants (easy genetic manipulation)
References
- ↑ Alberts B., Johnson A., Lewis J., Raff M., Roberts K. and Walter P. (2008) Molecular Biology of the cell, 5th edition, New York: Garland Science page 36