How fun can a plant be? Very fun, in the case of marihuana. Not so fun in the case of ricin. The excitement might vary for broccoli. But I doubt many of you are super interested in thale cress with the scientific name Arabidopsis thaliana.
So why keep reading if this plant is so boring? Because, obviously, it isn’t. At least not for geneticists! Because just like the mouse and the fruit fly, A. thaliana is an important model organism. But what does that even mean?
Imagine you want to do genetic research. With what do you start? Sequencing a whole genome is easier today than it was 20 years ago, but it’s still a lot of work. And it’s not enough to sequence a Gene, because that only gives you something like below:
GACTGAGAGATCAGGCTA
That’s …. Not very useful. You can’t even see it’s part of a gene or just some random junk! And now imagine the human genome with 3 fucking billion base pairs. Pairs because to each letter above, there is a corresponding letter. (A - T, G - C). So, if you want to study an organism, to study the genes, you can’t just sequence it all and call it a day. You need to check what everything does. For that, you want model organisms.
Model organisms usually reproduce fast (you wouldn’t use a horse for this reason), are easy to grow in the lab (again, sucks with a horse) are relatively cheap and it’s relatively easy to induce mutations (two-headed horse?).
Enter A. thaliana, a plant with a small genome that has been completely sequenced since 2000, 3 years before the human genome. It’s easy to grow, cheap, small so it doesn’t take up much space and mutations are induced very easily through a bacterium.
Agrobacterium tumefaciens is a bacterium that induces plant tumors in nature by randomly inserting a DNA fragment (T-DNA) into the plant’s genome. This disrupts any gene it hits and causes a mutation.
What does the bored biologist do? They infect A. thaliana with A. tumefaciens, let a new plant grow and see what happens. If something interesting happens, they can check which gene was changed and draw conclusions from it.
And then we have … the function of a plant gene. Great. What do we do with that? Aside from the obvious, genetically engineering plants (did you know A. thaliana is in the same family as broccoli, cabbage, kale, and rapeseed? How were you supposed to, you didn’t even know this plant 10 minutes ago).
Nature isn’t very segregated. We all (probably) evolved from the same first cell. That means we share genes with all animals and plants. Genes that are kept unchanged throughout evolution are called conserved genes and you’d be surprised how many of those we have.
A. thaliana has genes that are similar to genes connected to diseases in us. 70% of genes that might be linked to cancer in us can be found in a similar form in A. thaliana. The circadian clock has been genetically characterized in A. thaliana.
This small plant is in fact so useful that NASA sent some into space to research its life cycle in microgravity on board the ISS. Results are still pending.
So don’t underestimate plants, they might just save our life one day. Or not. Who knows.
Sources:
Arabidopsis thaliana: A Model Plant for Genome Analysis
Life Cycle of Arabidopsis thaliana in Microgravity (Arabidopsis thaliana)
The Impact of Arabidopsis on Human Health
Generation and characterization of Arabidopsis T-DNA insertion mutants
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