First to understand why Arabidopsis became the leading plant model, you must understand what a model organism is. A model organism is a species, plant or animal that has been extensively studied, as it is usually easy to maintain and breed in a laboratory environment and has biological advantages that benefit experiments. Arabidopsis Thaliana has gone by a few common names such as Thale cress or the Mouse ear cress. Although the plant may seem unimpressive by the 1980’s this plant exploded in popularity for research due to its unique number of chromosomes as well as other advantages. Although it did need to compete with other more commercially …show more content…
The TAIRS project is not the only reason that research was widely done it was helped early on by the NSF (National Science fund) which provided large grants to researchers that were pursuing this field especially in a time where plant biology took a major back seat to all animal biology