The DNA of Arabidopsis thaliana

Summary Arabidopsis thaliana is a small flowering plant of the mustard family. It has a four to five week generation time, can be self- or cross-pollinated and bears as many as 10⁴ seeds per plant. Many visible and biochemical mutations exist and have been mapped by recombination to one of the five chromosomes that comprise the haploid karyotype. With the experiments reported here we demonstrate that Arabidopsis has an extraordinarily small haploid genome size (approximately 7×10⁷ nucleotide pairs) and a low level of cytosine methylation for an angiosperm. In addition, it appears to have little repetitive DNA in its nuclear DNA, in contrast to other higher plants.