Ann Gibbons

The Peopling of the Americas

Last week the U.S. government put up

Calibrating the Mitochondrial Clock

12.7 million to begin large-scale sequencing of Arabidopsis thaliana, a small, flowering member of the mustard family. The awards will fund the U.S. portion of an international collaboration that will attempt to decipher the plants entire genome by 2004. Arabidopsis has several features that make sequencing its genome a worthwhile challenge. Sequencing Arabidopsis should also have a significant impact on plant science, because all 250,000 species of flowering plants, from corn to tulips to cherry trees, are genetically very similar.