Use of “model” plants

The possibility of using information generated in one plant species to facilitate discovery in another has encouraged the concept of the "model" plant. The idea is to concentrate research on a small number of species, and then extrapolate the findings to other plants.
The advantages of model organisms are:

- Efficient use of resources (financial, material, human).
- The ability to focus on a species which requires little space for growing, which has a short generation time, a small genome and few chromosomes etc. The prime example is Arabidopsis (see next slide).
- The consolidation of research, and therefore the acquisition of more comprehensive knowledge - it can be easier to understand developmental processes by intensive study in one plant, as opposed to superficially in many.