Life with 25,000 Genes

Plants make the earth a good place for humans to live. They produce the oxygen we breathe, the food we eat, fuel for our cars and factories, fiber for the clothes we wear, wood for the houses we live in, and chemicals that keep us healthy or help cure us when we get sick. Plus, they are pleasant to look at, fun to grow, and intellectually interesting. Given all of this, it is surprising that they remain so poorly understood.

The completion of the Arabidopsis genome sequence will do much to change this ( Arabidopsis Genome Initiative 2000; Lin et al. 1999; Mayer et al. 1999; Salanoubat et al. 2000; Tabata et al. 2000;Theologis et al. 2000). As the first plant genome to be sequenced, this is rightly heralded as a landmark event. With the array of molecular genetic tools available for Arabidopsis and the impetus provided by the 2010 project, it will not be long before we know the physiological and developmental function of every gene in this species (Chory et al. 2000; Somerville and Dangl 2000). It is easy to take these events for granted in the era of genomic sequencing and reverse genetics. However, none of this would have happened without the major change in plant biology that has taken place in the last 15 years (Fink 1998). For example, in the late 1970's and early 1980's, students in Ian Sussex' plant biology laboratory completed Ph.D. theses on no less than 11 species, most of which were crop plants (my contribution was tobacco). At the time of Sussex's retirement in 1997, all but one of the students in his lab were studying Arabidopsis (I. Sussex, pers. comm.). The recent explosion of interest inArabidopsis—a weed of absolutely no economic importance—is …