Arabidopsis-how the insignificant becomes important

The olive groves of Mount Athos are a forest-ecosystem of high aesthetic value in which the olive groves are surrounded by forests. Many plants grow in these olive groves, but from all of them we chose to talk about a tiny, humble and insignificant one that almost catches your eye, the Arabidopsis.

Arabidopsis is the model plant, it is the plant of experiments, the experimental plant!

To date, 380000 plant species have been recorded on earth (of which about 6000 exist in our country and of these about 1300 grow only in Greece and nowhere else - the so-called endemic).

Their systematic recording, classification - grouping has a long history as well as the finding of a system that will representatively describe the structure of the plant world.

The species is the unit of botanical classification in the plant kingdom, the unit in the systematic classification of plants.

In the international nomenclature, all plants are written with two Latin words, the first of which indicates the genus and the second the species - just as we humans identify ourselves by writing our surname and our name. 

 Arabidopsis thaliana was discovered in the 16th century (1577) by Johannes Thal (thaliana) in the mountains of northern Germany. What an erotic! The first glance of the discovery ... Thal showed it to humanity.

It was later baptized Arabidopsis Thaliana with the system of binomial nomenclature established by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnæus (1707-1778)

Its name comes from the Greek "Arabidopsis" because it looks like the weapon Arabida  a short, light and repetitive rifle, a short-barreled carbine of the early twentieth century.

But it may have taken its name from the jib, the small triangular bow of the bow which is also called arabid, assuming that its flowers flutter like arabid.

Arabidopsis is the ideal organism for the study of plant growth.

The small genome that this small plant has, makes it easy to genetically map and sequence the genome and so it was one of the first plants whose genome was encoded. 

Its small size, as it consists of a dense rosette of leaves very close to the soil and the shoot (height around 25-30cm), is an advantage as it allows its cultivation in the laboratory, for experiments instead of experiments being done outdoors in fields.

Another important advantage is its very short life cycle as it blooms in one month and produces mature seeds in two months from its germination and in fact this time can be reduced by two weeks, in laboratory conditions.

It is also an indigenous plant that produces more than 1000 seeds per plant protected inside the horn, something like a small bean that looks like a horn.  

So, Arabidopsis is today the most studied plant in the world, this "vegetable diamond" which in the photographic lens highlights its beauty in all its size.