Lessons from Arabidopsis

The Arabidopsis genome was fully sequenced in 2000. Many informative discoveries emerged from this, a few being:

The total number of genes was just over 25,000 - far fewer than expected.

The number of gene families and singletons was comparable to other multi-cellular eukaryotes, indicating that a proteome size of 11,000-15,000 is sufficient for a wide diversity of multicellular life.

Arabidopsis has more duplicated genes and multi-gene families than non-plant eukaryotes, mainly because of the effect of polyploidy, which is rare in the animal kingdom, but is very common in plants. The sequence tells us that it probably experienced two rounds of duplication during its evolution (Ku et al., 2000, Vision et al., 2000).