Arabidopsis thaliana

Arabidopsis thaliana is a small blossoming plant of the mustard family. Arabidopsis is not a valuable agricultural plant and is considered to be a weed. On the molecular level, Arabidopsis is one of the best-studied plants. Arabidopsis is a small, fast growing plant, which makes it convenient for studying, because it is easy to cultivate under minimum conditions and experiments do not require much space. It is often used as a model organism in molecular biology research. This plant has a short generation span: in takes only about 6 weeks from sprouting of seeds to formation of a mature plant. Arabidopsis may mature more than 5000 seeds. This represents another characteristic, which makes Arabidopsis attractive for genetic analysis.

Arabidopsis genome contains 125 millions of base pairs. Arabidopsis has 25 500 genes.

Arabidopsis genome contains five pairs of chromosomes. For transformation of Arabidopsis, bacteria Agrobacterium tumefacients are used.