Arabidopsis thaliana is a small annual plant native of Europe and Central Asia. Currently is found in the temperate zones, because it prefers sandy soil. In Italy it’s present everywhere. Although it is not used in agronomy, this plant is widely studied because acts as a model organism for plant biology. The size of its genome, in fact, make it an ideal plant to draw genetic maps and for genome sequencing and its genome has been the first in the plants kindom to be sequenced. From that moment on, this plant has become the key point of plants research, which purpose is to discover the function of the approximately twenty-nine genes it contains. So it’s important to know it better.
Arabidopsis thaliana is an herbaceous plant with a height between 10 and 50 cm. It has a barrel covered with branched hairs, that are thicker at the base. Its leaves have an oval or elliptical shape andits flowers appear in clusters at the end of the stem. These flowers are hermaphrodite, i.e. with attributes of both sexes. Their diameter is about 0.5 cm and they have four white petals. Its fruit, called siliqua, grows in the center of the flower, is cylindrical in shape, it is about 1 mm long, 3 cm thick and when it’s mature it’s orange. Inside it has two cavities in which there are a lot of ovoid seeds: about thirty per fruit.
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