Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh.

Mouse Ear Cress; Thalecress

Herb

Annual

Vascular

Mouse Ear Cress is an introduced winter annual in the Mustard family (Brassicaceae). It is native to Europe, Asia, and northern Africa. Mouse Ear Cress can be found throughout Alabama. Typical habitats include cemetaries, fallow fields, roadsides, along railroad tracks, and gravel parking lots. Mouse Ear Cress produces a basal rosette of leaves in the early winter that is about the size of a quarter or smaller. In late winter and early spring the flowering shoots are produced, and rapidly grow to a height of three to six inches. There may be a few reduced leaves along the flowering stem, but it is essentially leafless. Flowering stems are unbranched, or branched from near the middle. The flowers have four white petals. The elongated fruit is a silique (a dry fruit that is more than three times as long as broad. When the seed are mature the outer halves of the fruit fall away leaving the seed exposed on a papery septum). Mouse Ear Cress is to plant genetics what the Fruit Fly is to animal genetics. It has been used as a model organism because it has a small genome, the small size of the plant, its rapid life cycle (going from seed to seed in six weeks or less), and it is easily grown in the lab. It was the first plant genome to be sequenced, completed in 2000 by the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative.--A. Diamond

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Not Native GNR (Global Rank)

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