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.

The features which make the plant a suitable model organism include;

1. Large supply of the plants available
2. Fully sequenced genome (roughly 140 million nucleotide pairs)
3. Production of thousands of offspring per plant after 8-10 weeks
4. Use of mutagenic chemicals to produce mutants (easy genetic manipulation)