Discovery and Name Origin
The plant was first discovered in 1577 in the Harz Mountains by Johannes Thal (1542–1583), a physician from Nordhausen, Thüringen, Germany, who called it Pilosella siliquosa. In 1753, Carl Linnaeus renamed the plant Arabis thaliana in honor of Thal. In 1842, the German botanist Gustav Heynhold erected the new genus Arabidopsis and placed the plant in that genus. The genus name, Arabidopsis comes from Greek, meaning "resembling Arabis" (the genus in which Linnaeus had initially placed it).
Read more about this topic: Arabidopsis Thaliana
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