Prehistory and History of Arabidopsis Research

The earliest non-taxonomic appearance of Arabi- dopsis in the literature of botany appears to be a paper by Alexander Braun in 1873, describing a mu- tant plant found in a field near Berlin (7). The muta- tion was almost certainly in the AGAMOUS gene, now well known as one of the floral ABC regulators and cloned in 1990 (54). The next notable appearance of Arabidopsis in the experimental literature was in 1907, when Friedrich Laibach (1885-1967), a student in Strasburger's laboratory in Bonn, published an account of the chromosome number of several plants. He was attempting to find a plant with a small num- ber of large chromosomes to be used in experiments to determine the individuality of chromosomes (23). Arabidopsis was not such a plant: the chromosomes are very small. The next relevant appearance of Ara- bidopsis was in a 1935 paper that resulted from a Russian expedition to find a plant that could be used in genetics and cytogenetics, as Drosophila was then used (15, 51). Although the small chromosome num- ber (incorrectly stated by Titova to be a haploid no. of three; Laibach had correctly counted five in 1907) and rapid time to flowering were considered useful fea- tures, the small size of the plant and its parts were considered a disadvantage, as was the inability to distinguish different chromosome pairs. It does not appear that Arabidopsis was ever used in the labo- ratory by Titova and her colleagues.