ADVANTAGES OF ARABIDOPSIS FOR CLONING PLANT GENES

Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) has been adopted by a large number of plant biologists as the model organism in which to use a molecular genetic approach to dissect many plant processes. The small genome size of Arabidopsis and the concentration of effort on this plant species has led to an international collaboration to construct a physical map of the genome. The physical map will greatly facilitate gene isolation without the need for each laboratory to initiate chromosome walks. This, in combination with the development of efficient insertional mutagenesis systems, will mean that in the next few years the number of genes cloned from Arabidopsis will increase enormously.