What's mouse-ear cress, and why should you care whether it's perennial?
Mouse-ear cress (better known to scientists as
Arabidopsis thaliana) is a little weed in the mustard family that has become the most studied plant in the world in the last thirty years. Its genome has been fully sequenced, and a tremendous amount is known about the underlying molecular mechanisms that are responsible for variation in many of its traits. It's become a "model organism" for many studies in plant genetics, plant molecular biology, plant physiology, plant ... anything. Why?
photo by W.S. Justice, courtesy Smithsonian InstitutionWell,
Arabidopsis thaliana is small, easy to grow, and it has a small genome. It can complete its entire life cycle in six weeks, so scientists can get through eight generations a year, which is very important if you're doing genetics experiments that require several generations to complete. In the wild, it's an annual (occasionally a biennial, depending on when it flowers and when seeds germinate). And because it's so small you can grow hundreds in a growth chamber in the corner of a lab, keeping the growing conditions quite uniform and growing a lot of individuals. For these reasons and more this little plant has an entire web site of its own.
The Arabidopsis Information Resource provides a database of genetic and molecular biology data, as well as links to a variety of other
Arabidopsis resources and information about the Arabidopsis research community. In short, by working on Arabidopsis, plant biologists and plant geneticists can take advantage of a lot of work that other people have already done to ask very sophisticated and complicated problems using the most powerful tools of genetics and molecular biology. Which brings us finally to the topic of this post, perennial mouse-ear cress.
Wait!
Perennial mouse-ear cress? Didn't I tell you a few sentences ago that it's an annual, or sometimes a biennial?
