Thale Cress (Arabidopsis thaliana)Genome
Arabidopsis thaliana,an annual crucifer weed called 'thale cress' has been a favourite material for plant scientists and has often been compared with Drosophilaof animal geneticists. It is commonly found growing in the paths and walls of many gardens and is widely distributed around the world in many different climates and habitats, ranging from Arctic to the equator.
Its adaptation to diverse climatic conditions, therefore, provides unique opportunity to study adaptation and the molecular mechanism underlying this adaptation.  It has a small adult plant size, small generation time (few weeks), each plant giving large number of offspring. It also has a small nuclear genome of about 130 Mb, comprising 5 chromosomes (2n = 10) and has less than 10% repetitive DNA .in its genome.

These attributes facilitated a community of scientists to utilize this weed in both classical laboratory experiments and molecular biology work leading to our understanding of a number of growth processes in higher plants. It also led to characterization of a number of genes that may be useful for improvement of our crop plants. This research activity of Arabidopsiscommunity was later supported by an international collaboration (involving scientists from USA, Europe and Japan), called The ArabidopsisGenome Initiative (TAGI), which began sequencing the Arabidopsisgenome in 1996. The sequencing of ~ 116 Mb of DNA comprising 26,000 genes and almost the entire genome of Arabidopsiswas completed and published in 14 December, 2000 issue of Nature, a prestigious journal published from UK.