Friesner Joanna D, Argueso Cristiana T, Busch Wolfgang, Hamann Thorsten, Strader Lucia, Williams Mary, Wu Shuang, Roeder Adrienne H K
North American Arabidopsis Steering Committee, Corvallis, OR 97330, USA.
Department of Agricultural Biology, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO 80523, USA.
Plant Cell. 2025 May 9;37(5). doi: 10.1093/plcell/koaf106.
Plants are essential for life as we know it on Earth. They oxygenate the atmosphere, regulate the climate, and comprise much of the primary producers underpinning complex food systems. In the 1980s, a multinational group of plant scientists chose the small angiosperm-Arabidopsis thaliana-to serve as the model flowering plant for genetic and molecular studies that would be leveraged to produce vast new datasets, resources, and tools. The rationale they used to persuade funding agencies to make significant investments and focus intense effort on this single plant species was to produce a deep fundamental knowledge of the biology of plants and to apply this knowledge to valuable, but typically less tractable, plant species. Over the past 40 yr, Arabidopsis has emerged as the most powerful and versatile plant model to uncover core biological principles and served as a prototyping system to test advanced molecular and genetic concepts. We argue that the emerging challenges of accelerating climate instability and a rapidly growing global population call for renewed and robust investments in fundamental plant biology research. Leveraging the power of Arabidopsis research, resources, datasets, and global collaborative community is more important than ever. This commentary lays out a vigorous defense of foundational, i.e. "basic," plant science research; describes that often, Arabidopsis is preferable to working directly in crops; highlights several transformative applications generated from basic plant research; and makes the argument that plant science is vital to the survival of humanity.
正如我们所知，植物对地球上的生命至关重要。它们为大气提供氧气，调节气候，并且是支撑复杂食物系统的主要生产者的重要组成部分。在20世纪80年代，一群跨国植物科学家选择了小型被子植物——拟南芥——作为遗传和分子研究的模式开花植物，这些研究将用于生成大量新的数据集、资源和工具。他们说服资助机构对这一单一植物物种进行重大投资并集中精力研究的理由是，要深入了解植物生物学的基础知识，并将这些知识应用于有价值但通常较难处理的植物物种。在过去的40年里，拟南芥已成为揭示核心生物学原理最强大、最通用的植物模型，并作为一个原型系统来测试先进的分子和遗传概念。我们认为，气候不稳定加速和全球人口迅速增长等新出现的挑战要求对基础植物生物学研究进行新的、有力的投资。利用拟南芥研究的力量、资源、数据集和全球合作群体比以往任何时候都更加重要。这篇评论为基础植物科学研究进行了有力辩护；描述了通常情况下，研究拟南芥比直接研究作物更可取；强调了基础植物研究产生的几个变革性应用；并论证了植物科学对人类生存至关重要。
