The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Arabidopsis thaliana
Also called Mouse-ear Cress, Thale Cress, Wall Cress, Common Wall Cress, Thalius' Cress, Arabidopsis
Thale cress is a small annual weed in the mustard family (Brassicaceae), native to Eurasia and Africa, and widely used as a model organism in plant biology. It is easy to grow from seed in cool conditions and completes its life cycle in about six weeks.
Arabidopsis thaliana, the thale cress, mouse-ear cress or arabidopsis, is a small plant from the mustard family (Brassicaceae), native to Eurasia and Africa. Commonly found along the shoulders of roads and in disturbed land, it is generally considered a weed.
A winter annual with a relatively short lifecycle, A. thaliana is a popular model organism in plant biology and genetics. For a complex multicellular eukaryote, A. thaliana has a relatively small genome of around 135 megabase pairs. It was the first plant to have its genome sequenced, and is an important tool for understanding the molecular biology of many plant traits, including flower development and light sensing.
A. thaliana is native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, and its geographic distribution is rather continuous from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and Spain to Greece. It also appears to be native in tropical alpine ecosystems in Africa and perhaps South Africa. It has been introduced and naturalized worldwide, including in North America around the 17th century.
Botanists and biologists began to research A. thaliana in the early 1900s, and the first systematic description of mutants was done around 1945. A. thaliana is now widely used for studying plant sciences, including genetics, evolution, population genetics, and plant development. Although A. thaliana the plant has little direct significance for agriculture, A. thaliana the model organism has revolutionized our understanding of the genetic, cellular, and molecular biology of flowering plants.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Arabidopsis thaliana by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
