Special Issue

Foreword to the Special Issue on Arabidopsis Genetics

Let me be dressed as fine as I will,

Flies, worms and flowers, exceed me still

ISAAC WATTS (1674–1748), in Divine Songs Attempted in Easy Language for the Use of Children (1715).

THE flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has in the last decade joined the small group of popular model systems well suited to laboratory studies in classical, population, evolutionary, developmental, and molecular genetics. In addition to the fly and the worm (and yeast, the mouse, and others), we now have the weed. To introduce members of the Genetics Society to Arabidopsis, and researchers who use Arabidopsis to the Genetics Society, we invited a number of Arabidopsis labs to send their latest work to GENETICS, with the intention of adding a series of Arabidopsis articles (after the usual GENETICS review process) to a special issue. This is it, out in time for the annual Arabidopsis meeting at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (June 24–29). The breadth of topics gives a view of present-day work on this model plant and demonstrates the potential for further work. The articles also show that the methods for studying gene segregation and function in Arabidopsis have become highly developed and suitable for sophisticated experimentation.

The next decade should see rapid gains. The Arabidopsis genome project, an international collaboration, has already provided a databank of expressed sequences that total about half of the 20,000 to 25,000 transcription units expected to be in the genome. More than 25 Mb of the nuclear genome, around 25%, has been completed in systematic sequencing efforts. The mitochondrial genome of 367 kb has been completely sequenced. The entire nuclear genome is slated to be sequenced by 2004, and plans to accelerated the effort are presently afoot so as to achieve completion in 2000. Functional studies of genes are already receiving a boost from publicly available collections of T-DNA and transposon tagged mutants, and recent reports indicate that homologous gene knockout methods are on the horizon, to add to the many mutants available from saturation mutageneses already performed with ionizing radiation and chemical mutagens.

Plant genetics is thus in a renaissance, 132 years after the publication of MENDEL's paper. An entire plant genome may be sequenced by 2000, exactly 100 years after the rediscovery of that paper by the plant geneticists who founded our science. We hope that this issue will help to attract more plant geneticists to join the Genetics Society and will attract the attention of the members of the Society to plants.

Elliot Meyerowitz^a, Daphne Preuss^b, and Venkatesan Sundaresan^c
a California Institute of Technology
^b University of Chicago
^c Institute of Molecular Agrobiology, National University of Singapore