Arabidopsis Thaliana - History of Arabidopsis Research

History of Arabidopsis Research

The first mutant in arabidopsis was documented in 1873 by Alexander Braun, describing a double flower phenotype (the mutated gene was likely Agamous, cloned and characterized in 1990). However, not until 1943 did Friedrich Laibach (who had published the chromosome number in 1907) propose arabidopsis as a model organism. His student, Erna Reinholz, published her thesis on arabidopsis in 1945, describing the first collection of arabidopsis mutants that they generated using X-ray mutagenesis. Laibach continued his important contributions to arabidopsis research by collecting a large number of ecotypes. With the help of Albert Kranz, these were organised into the current ecotype collection of 750 natural accessions of A. thaliana from around the world.

In the 1950s and 1960s, John Langridge and George Rédei played an important role in establishing arabidopsis as a useful organism for biological laboratory experiments. Rédei wrote several scholarly reviews instrumental in introducing the model to the scientific community. The star of the arabidopsis research community dates to a newsletter called Arabidopsis Information Service (AIS), established in 1964. The first International Arabidopsis Conference was held in 1965, in Göttingen, Germany.

In the 1980s, arabidopsis started to become widely used in plant research laboratories around the world. It was one of several candidates that included maize, petunia and tobacco. The latter two were attractive, since they were easily transformable with the then current technologies, while maize was a well-established genetic model for plant biology. The breakthrough year for arabidopsis as the preferred model plant came in 1986, when T-DNA-mediated transformation was first published, and this coincided with the first gene to be cloned and published in Arabidopsis.

Characterized ecotypes and mutant lines of arabidopsis serve as experimental material in laboratory studies. The most commonly used background lines are Ler, or Landsberg erecta, and Col, or Columbia. Other background lines less-often cited in the scientific literature are Ws, or Wassilewskija, C24, Cvi, or Cape Verde Islands, Nossen, etc. (see for ex.) Series of mutants, named Ler-x, Col-x, have been obtained and characterized; mutant lines are generally available through stock centers, of which best known are the Nottingham Arabidopsis Stock Center-NASC and the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center-ABRC in Ohio, USA. The Col or Columbia ecotype was selected, as an agronomically performant line, by Rédei, within a (nonirradiated) population of seeds named Landsberg he received from Laibach. Columbia is the ecotype sequenced in the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative. The Ler or Landsberg erecta line was selected by Rédei from within a Landsberg population on which he had performed some X-ray mutagenesis experiments. As the Ler collection of mutants is derived from this initial line, Ler-0 does not correspond to the Landsberg ecotype which is named La-0.