Arabidopsis - standard chassis in iGEM

Description

In biotechnology plants are used to produce industrial products, for bioremediation, to obtain energy and also are easily to introduce into an ecosystem than other organisms; for these reasons plant manipulation is a focus area in biological engineering. Unfortunately not many projects on iGEM was already made in plants, because takes too much time to growth and, also information in the registry are not widely accessible.
Arabidopsis thaliana is a model organism that was previously described as chassis. F. Laibach first summarized the potential of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism for genetics in 1943. It was first promoted as model for molecular genetics in 1985 and first transformed with high-efficiency in 1993. Since then has been the model organism for plants.

Advantages

• Arabidopsis Thaliana is one of the first eukaryotic experimental model organism
• The knowledge recollect in this plant can be applied in others organism like animal and other eukaryotes
• It allows working with any part of the plant, seeds, leaves, root, flowers.
• It has a short life that make it easy to laboratory work
• The self-reproduction makes it possible to obtain large population of seedlings for specific characteristic or phenotype
• Small genome (114.5 Mb/125 Mb total) has been sequenced in the year 2000.
• Extensive genetic and physical maps of all 5 chromosomes.
• A rapid life cycle (about 6 weeks from germination to mature seed).
• Prolific seed production and easy cultivation in restricted space.
• Efficient transformation methods utilizing Agrobacterium tumefaciens.
• A large number of mutant lines and genomic resources many of which are available from Stock Centers.
• Multinational research community of academic, government and industry laboratories.