Arabidopsis thaliana as an experimental organism

In the past decades, plant research has experienced an incredibly fast growth, thanks both to the increasing number of scientists joining the field and the great number of publicly available tools. In this context, Arabidopsis thaliana still retains a central role in Plant Science, being the prominent plant model adopted worldwide. Indeed, its main features such as easy and fast growth, high seed production, easy genetic manipulation and a completely sequenced genome still place Arabidopsis as the best model for studying plants. Arabidopsis has proven to be an ideal organism for studying plant development at the molecular, cellular, organismal and ecological levels. By concentrating their efforts on a single model system, Arabidopsis scientists have made outstanding advances in almost any field of plant research. Further, discoveries made in Arabidopsis have been translated to other plant species such as economically important crops, as well as to animal systems, including complex human disease processes.