Back in 2020 Juniper wrote a post, 7 Plants You’ll Be Seeing More Of As Model Species. A model plant is a species that scientists use as a stand-in for studying how plants work in general. It's the same idea as a model organism in biology — researchers pick one species and study it intensively, rather than trying to work on thousands of different plants at once.
Good model plants tend to be small, fast-growing and easy to keep in a lab. If a plant goes from seed to seed in a few weeks, you can run experiments across many generations without waiting years for results. A small genome helps too, because it's cheaper and quicker to sequence, and easier to figure out which gene does what.
The most famous model plant is Arabidopsis thaliana, a small weed in the cabbage family that ticks all these boxes. But no single species can answer every question. You wouldn't study how grasses make grain by looking at a weed with tiny pods, and you can't study salt tolerance in a plant that wilts at the first sign of salt. So scientists have developed other model species, each chosen because it's particularly good for investigating a specific problem — from parasitism to invasion biology to how flowers get their shape.
I've spent all week squashing bugs, so haven't had time to think much about a theme for these week's plant hunt, but I liked Juniper's work, so I've done a bit of a Striga hermonthica and attached myself to Juniper's roots for this week. We now have nine model plants that aren't Arabidopsis.
You can assume that anything insightful is Juniper's work and the mistakes are all mine. /Alun
How to Play
Plant Hunt is a game of memory. The goal is to match all the cards in the shortest number of time and attempts. You uncover cards in pairs, by clicking or tapping the back of them. If the cards match, you'll see them in large form, and they'll stay face up. Once you get them all, you'll get a time and move count. If you like you can share this with others, or be sneaky and try again. Though you might find your memory playing tricks, the more attempts you make.
If you want more information about the plants, you'll find it below the playing area.
Cover image: Brett Alexander / Getty / Canva
