Scientific Name	Arabidopsis thaliana
Common Name	mouse-ear cress, thale-cress;
Taxonomy ID	3702
Lineage	cellular organisms > Viridiplantae > Streptophyta > Streptophytina > Embryophyta > Tracheophyta > Euphyllophyta > Spermatophyta > Magnoliophyta > Mesangiospermae > eudicotyledons > Gunneridae > Pentapetalae > rosids > malvids > Brassicales > Brassicaceae > Camelineae > Arabidopsis
External Links	NCBI; EBI; JGI; PLAZA; Specialized Database
Representative Assembly	TAIR10	GCF_000001735.3	DNA GFF RNA Protein

Description:

Arabidopsis thaliana (thale cress, mouse-ear cress or arabidopsis) is a small flowering plant of mustard family brassicaceae (Cruciferae) and is native to Eurasia. It is distributed throughout the world and was first reported in the sixteenth century by Johannes Thal. A. thaliana is considered a weed; it is found by roadsides and in disturbed lands. A winter annual with a relatively short life cycle. It has been used for over fifty years to study plant mutations and for classical genetic analysis. It is now being used as a model organism to study different aspects of plant biology. A. thaliana is a diploid plant with 2n = 10 chromosomes. It became the first plant genome to be fully sequenced based on the fact that it has a (1) small genome of ~120 Mb with a simple structure having few repeated sequences (2) short generation time of six weeks from seed germination to seed set, and (3) produces large number of seeds. The sequencing was done by an international collaboration collectively termed the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI). Though of no economic importance, it is an invaluable resource to agriculturally important crops, particularly to members of the same family, which includes canola, an important source of vegetable oil. In 2016, it was named as one of the organisms that would be involved in CRISPR-based genetic engineering.