Arabidopsis also shares genes with a group of more rudimentary life forms, the cyanobacteria.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome

The Arabidopsis sequence is, for the moment, the only one in the garden.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome

Indeed, almost 140 genes implicated in human diseases such as hereditary deafness have recognisable relatives in Arabidopsis where their importance is, as yet, unknown.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome

Arabidopsis thaliana was used because it is a standard laboratory workhorse.

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The research team, led by synthetic biologist Omri Amirav-Drory and plant scientist Kyle Taylor, aims to transplant a bioluminescence gene into a small plant called Arabidopsis, a member of the mustard family.

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Knowing what the comparable gene in Arabidopsis is, and what it does, gives Ceres and its competitors a short cut to help them decide how their own genes might work in a crop species.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome

But it is a useful discovery, because such duplication is also found in species such as maize, and it thus makes Arabidopsis an even better model for other things botanical than researchers had previously thought.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome

According to Virginia Walbot, a botanist at Stanford University who is one of the Nature paper's authors, the Arabidopsis sequence will be a boon to researchers working on economically important plants, such as maize, that have large genomes which are harder to alter experimentally.

ECONOMIST: The Arabidopsis genome