Much of this work has been done on the hardy arabidopsis—“the lab rat of plants,” as He puts it. There are a few things that make it the perfect test subject. One is that the humble weed’s genome is fairly short, part of the reason it was the first plant to be fully sequenced. Another is the unique way its code can be modified. For most plants, the process is painstaking. New genetic material is introduced in a petri dish, borne by bacteria that slip into the plant’s cells. Once that happens, those modified cells must be cultured and coaxed into new roots and stems. But arabidopsis offers a
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