Midget plant gets makeover
Tuesday, June 23, 2009 - 06:07
in Biology & Nature
A tiny plant with a long name (Arabidopsis thaliana) helps researchers from over 120 countries learn how to design new crops to help meet increasing demands for food, biofuels, industrial materials, and new medicines. The genes, proteins, and other traits of this fast-growing, tiny mustard plant reside in a vast database dubbed the Arabidopsis Information Resource (TAIR), which has over 1.6 million page hits each month. The TAIR group, headed by Dr Eva Huala at Carnegie's Department of Plant Biology, just released a new version of the genome sequence of this model plant, which includes an array of improvements and novel features that promise to accelerate this critical research...