Arabidopsis thaliana

Abstract

During the last 45 years, i.e., since Laibach's 1940 paper, the Eurasian and circummediterranean cruciferous weed Arahidopsis thaliana has become (among higher plants) one of the most important tools in the fields of developmental physiology, genetics, and more recently, cosmic biology. This is due to the short life cycles of its earlier genotypes (up to approximately 8 generations per annum), the modesty of its requirements with regard to space and substratum (soil or synthetic media), the possibilities of vegetative cloning, tissue and anther culture, and protoplast fusion, and the availability of innumerable local races and mutants for most divergent purposes. * Therefore, review articles on A. thaliana have been included in several handbooks and other collective volumes, e.g., by Redei, lol-l03 Ivanov,47 and the present author. 90 In order to avoid unnecessary duplication I shall frequently refer to this latter review, and the present report should be regarded rather as a supplement to the earlier one than as its second (revised and enlarged) edition. As there are hundreds of publications dealing with the flowering behavior of this species, only examples can be given within the limited space of this contribution.