ABSTRACT
During the last 45 years, i.e., since Laibach's 1940 paper, the Eurasian and circum-mediterranean cruciferous weed Arabidopsis thaliana has become (among higher plants) one of the most important tools in the fields of developmental physiology, genetics, and more recently, cosmic biology. This is due to the short life cycles of its earlier genotypes (up to approximately 8 generations per annum), the modesty of its requirements with regard to space and substratum (soil or synthetic media), the possibilities of vegetative cloning, tissue and anther culture, and protoplast fusion, and the availability of innumerable local races and mutants for most divergent purposes. *
