Question

Easy Plant bio question

4. What are 5 reasons scientists think Arabidopsis is amazing?

Answer 1

Arabidopsis thaliana is a small dicot plant which is routinely used in genetic engineering experiments by researchers. Following properties of A. thaliana make it a very useful plant to be used by scientists and researchers for experimentations:

1. The plant has very simple and short life-cycle, suggesting that vegetative as well as reproductive stages can be monitored easily and quickly.
2. The plant is easy to grow, maintain and observe and hence no special training or technique is required for rearing them.
3. The plant has a very simple and small genome and the genome has been fully sequenced by high-throughput techniques. This makes is a very useful organism for conducting genetics experiments since manipulation of the genome is very easy.
4. The plant shows sexual reproduction, production of flowers and seeds as well. This makes it extremely useful for understanding variuos unique phenomenon of the plant biodiversity, physiology and molecular biology.
5. The plant can be easily manipulated during genetic engineering since the genome has been fully sequenced and is of very small size. This makes is highly useful and informative in nature for study of genetic engineering and molecular biology.

Thus, owing to these reasons among others, A. thaliana remains one of the most famous model organism for research among scientists and researchers.