Seeding the Field
How the development of Arabidopsis thaliana as a model organism led to innovation in the plant sciences, agriculture and human health
In a Parisian library, Chris and Shauna Somerville poured over scientific tomes.
It was 1978, and the two young scientists were searching for an area where they could make an impact on a rapidly changing world. The Third Agricultural Revolution, better known as the Green Revolution, was underway, where new advancements in technology changed the way we feed the world.
Chris had just finished his Ph.D. studying E. coli, a model organism that's extensively studied to help scientists understand the intricacies of biology. Shauna had completed an MS in plant breeding, and had a clear understanding of the challenges involved in improving plant productivity and quality. They were searching for areas to research next.
When they stumbled upon George Rédei's research on a plant species called Arabidopsis thaliana, they knew they hit gold.
Chris and Shauna believed this little-known weed had the potential to become a model organism, like E. coli, and could help plant scientists in their endeavor to feed the world.
Today, Arabidopsis thaliana is used in plant labs at Michigan State University and around the world. It's led to major discoveries in their labs and the MSU-DOE Plant Research Laboratory. And it all began with a husband-and-wife team who would help pioneer Arabidopsis research at Michigan State University.
Seed
From Paris, the pair returned to the University of Alberta, bringing with them excitement for a plant their colleagues would prove to have little interest in. When the opportunity arose to invite Rédei to give a talk to their department, the Somervilles jumped at the chance.
“Unfortunately, no one would talk with him,” Chris recalls. “No one was interested in him at all. He was obscure, so we had him to ourselves for three days. We did a download of George during that period of time. We sat around with him hour after hour after hour, talking about Arabidopsis.”
Once Rédei returned home, he sent the Somervilles Arabidopsis seeds to get them started on their journey of discovery.
Later that year, the Somervilles moved to the University of Illinois, Chris as a postdoctoral researcher and Shauna as a PhD student, both in the lab of Bill Ogren. They used Arabidopsis to dissect the main pathway of photorespiration, a wasteful process in plants that happens during fixation of carbon dioxide. Their findings settled several debates among plant physiologists. It also put the Somervilles, and Arabidopsis, on the map.
Germination
The Somervilles were offered positions at the MSU-Department of Energy Plant Research Laboratory, or PRL, to continue their research on Arabidopsis. However, the conventions of academic appointments went against them continuing to work together, so following Shauna’s appointment as an assistant professor, she was encouraged to switch to working on diseases of cereals. As Chris built his new lab at MSU, he started championing Arabidopsis as a model organism that could influence the future of plant science.
The work attracted people outside of the plant sciences, including geneticists who had previously worked on other model organisms.
“We seeded a bunch of other areas,” Chris said. “My postdocs would come for a few years and get experienced working with Arabidopsis and start a new research topic. Then they would take it and form a lab somewhere else, so that’s how it started. That’s how we thought we would create the field.”
One member of the Somerville lab was Christoph Benning, who was a graduate student starting in 1986. Benning is currently the director of the PRL.
“I was surrounded by postdocs from all over the world,” Benning said. “Fantastic people in their respective fields, but not many of them had worked on plants. They learned how to use Arabidopsis as a model for plants and try to apply their knowledge from yeast or drosophila,” which are colloquially known as fruit flies.
So many research techniques were developed in this time, many of which are still used to this day. Christoph was likely the first graduate student at MSU to use the campus’s only PCR machine to make recombinant DNA for his research project. Polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, is a technique used to produce millions of copies of a specific segment of DNA so it can be more easily manipulated.
Before the PCR machine was purchased, Christoph recalls Chris testing the method manually.
“When I came in one evening to do some experiments, all water baths in the lab were occupied,” Christoph recollects. “Chris was moving test tubes between baths with different temperatures every five minutes or so. Basically, he conducted a manual PCR, and it worked.”
It was more than just the innovation of PCR at that time, but a host of other molecular methods which were arriving on the scene.
“It was a very exciting time,” Chris recalls. “Powerful new methods for interrogating and manipulating genes were being developed by people working in other fields like yeast, Drosophila and mammals, but the methods and tools were also readily applicable to Arabidopsis.”
Following her tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, Shauna returned to working with Arabidopsis.
In an interview with the American Society of Plant Biologists, Shauna wrote: “I played a part in bringing Arabidopsis to plant pathology. I was discouraged with early attempts by plant pathology colleagues to find a suitable Arabidopsis pathogen. I think they felt an introduced (in the USA) weed like Arabidopsis would not have any significant diseases. But over the years, examples of every major pathogen group have been studied in Arabidopsis and the information gleaned from these studies stimulated new discoveries and new applications for crop plants. It has been very satisfying to witness the demonstration of the value of a model plant to understanding plant biology.”
Seedling
Eventually, Chris saw hopeful signs that Arabidopsis research was catching on. The first was the creation of the mail bouncer at MSU, an email group that works similarly to how an e-newsletter works today. As more researchers signed up for the bouncer, Chris could tell that interest in Arabidopsis was spreading.
Then, in 1987, Chris organized the first modern International Conference on Arabidopsis Research in East Lansing, which brought researchers to MSU to discuss Arabidopsis. The attendance showed that many promising researchers were taking an interest.
A major milestone from this time was a paper published in Plant Physiology as a collaboration from Chris, Shauna and most of the PRL faculty. The paper categorized 3,700 expressed sequence tags, or ESTs, in Arabidopsis. ESTs are short segments of RNA sequence that are helpful in identifying which genes are expressed in a sample of RNA.
As this work was being done, largely by Tom Newman through a grant to the Somerville lab, ESTs that identified new plant genes with similar functions in other organisms were being revealed every day. Since very few plant genes had been identified at that time, it was very enabling to have Newman reporting the findings of new Arabidopsis genes.
“I thought it was unfair for us to have to have access to all this sequence information,” Chris said. “So every day, Tom would email his new sequences to the University of Minnesota and they put them up on a website, so that everybody in the world could see these sequences. That was one of our ideas about Arabidopsis – we wanted information to be open and everything available to everybody.”
Chris and Shauna remained at the PRL until 1993, when they moved to Stanford to continue their research. At that time, research papers published on Arabidopsis had grown from a handful in 1978 to just over 1000 in 1993. These days, searching for Arabidopsis in PubMed returns over 100,000 entries and more to come everyday.
In California, Chris had a lab at Stanford and was the Director of the Carnegie Institution for Science, Department of Plant Biology. Shauna also had a lab at the Carnegie Institute on the Stanford campus where she pioneered the use of “gene chips” for measuring the expression of all Arabidopsis genes in tissue samples. She also had a program in molecular mechanisms by which some varieties of Arabidopsis exhibited fungal disease resistance.
A project Chris brought with him from MSU was creating The Arabidopsis Information Resource, or TAIR. This project echoed the success of the bouncer and EST database, creating an open resource for scientists to access the latest findings in the field.
The first Stanford graduate student to join Chris’s lab at Carnegie was Seung Yon (Sue) Rhee, where she studied from 1994-1998. After graduation, she returned to Carnegie as a staff associate and founding director of TAIR in 1999. Currently, she is the director of the MSU Plant Resilience Institute.
“It was a very challenging project to launch and run, especially for someone just coming out of grad school,” Sue said. “But I learned a lot from the experience.”
TAIR is still running today, 25 years after its origin, now as a non-profit research source.
Unfurling
As technology continued to develop, understanding genes and their specific functions in organisms looked like the future of research.
In 1976, Bacteriophage MS2 was the first virus to have its genome sequenced. From there, researchers kept developing technologies that made genome sequencing easier. Chris and Shauna knew that uncovering the genome for Arabidopsis would allow researchers to get a fuller picture of not only Arabidopsis, but all plants.
Chris had been teaching at Cold Spring Harbor, a biomedical research and educational institute, in the summer of 1990. He worked alongside Elliot Meyerowitz, another pioneer in Arabidopsis research. Chris and Meyerowitz discussed the possibility of sequencing the Arabidopsis genome.
“The director of Cold Spring Harbor was Jim Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, and perhaps the most famous living biologist,” Chris said. “He had the tendency to come to the cafeteria early in the morning to see who was there, so I had breakfast with him sometimes. Elliot and I invited him to come with us to meet with the director of the National Science Foundation.”
Together, Chris and Meyerowitz decided that sequencing the Arabidopsis genome would be a huge – and expensive – undertaking. They needed to find supporters, other researchers to join the project and lots of funding.
Alongside James Watson, Chris and Meyerowitz pitched their idea to the NSF director.
“We explained how Arabidopsis was the key to really understanding plant biology and how we had recruited this community,” Chris said. He added that Jim Watson “said to the director ‘oh, these young guys have good ideas. You should listen to them.’”
They left the meeting with an agreement from the NSF Biological Sciences program to support the project. Other funding agencies supported the research as well, including the National Institutes of Health, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. International funders included agencies from Europe, Australia, Japan and more.
With this, the Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Research Project was underway, with Chris as the first chair of the advisory committee and Meyerowitz as the subsequent chair. Researchers from across the world applied, using their combined expertise and emerging technologies to make it happen.
“All these technologies that people take for granted now, they were developed right then,” Benning said. “In the early days when we found a gene that was interesting, we had to sequence it by hand. A major time drain of my Ph.D. work consisted of restriction mapping and hand sequencing a cosmid clone insert.”
Depending on the setup of the lab, sequencing even one gene could take weeks to months. As technology developed, this process sped up. To put the exponential growth of genetics into perspective, the 1990s Human Genome Project took 13 years to be completed. Now, a human genome can be sequenced in less than a day. Sequencing the Arabidopsis genome was estimated to cost around $100 million. Today it can be done for about $600.
These technological advances started in labs looking at Bacteriophage MS2 and continued to develop through the sequencing of Arabidopsis and other organisms. Without those first breakthroughs, we would not have the advances in human medicine that understanding genetics has brought us.
Flowering
It was at this point that the tide thoroughly turned for Arabidopsis, and it was widely accepted as the model organism for plant biology. At this time, Chris estimated there were 20,000 people studying Arabidopsis, an unfathomable number just two decades earlier.
Moving to Stanford opened new avenues for Chris and Shauna.
“I was the director of the Carnegie Institute, which had a couple of ecologists in it when I arrived,” Chris said. “They were mapping all the biosystems on Earth using satellite imaging. I liked it quite a lot because it was like sequencing a genome. It was a whole system approach to the problem.”
Chris concluded that the ecologists, Chris Field and Joe Berry, had a big idea that needed resources to develop. Ultimately, the pair convinced Chris that climate change was a pressing problem, which lead to him to redirect his efforts toward climate solutions.
Arabidopsis research was safe in the hands of enterprising young scientists, many of whom passed through the Somerville lab. Many went on to lead research groups of their own, including Benning and Rhee.
Benning returned to MSU in 1998 as an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. He was the director of the PRL from 2015 to August 2025, in the very place where he got his Ph.D. and Chris kicked off much of his work that would seed the field of Arabidopsis research.
Following his Ph.D. while still working with Chris, Christoph built his own collection of mutant Arabidopsis plants he worked with to discover genes involved in plant lipid metabolism.
“The collection actually became quite valuable,” Christoph said. “Particularly the mutants of Arabidopsis that couldn’t accumulate oil in the seed. One of them turned out to be defective in a transcription factor called WRINKLED1, encoded by a gene that Alex Cernac, a postdoc in my lab, and I later identified. Chris Somerville’s generosity towards his mentees and the community was second to none and guided my own approach to mentorship and service. The WRINKLED1 mutant was super exciting, and Chris knew it, but he let me take it as a starting base for my own career. The gene later became widely recognized as a biotechnological tool.”
Rhee stayed at Carnegie until 2023. She too joined MSU, as the director of the Plant Resilience Institute.
“I'm really grateful to Chris for taking me into his lab only after a couple of hours of conversation, without doing a rotation,” Rhee said. “I also know that he's been a supporter and advocate for me behind the scenes throughout my career and I owe a lot of my success to him. I am quite proud to be at MSU where Chris led a very successful group at the PRL for many years. I am looking forward to 'paying it forward' and supporting many MSU graduate students, postdocs and postbac researchers to become the next-generation leaders.”
The story of Arabidopsis is a prime example of why funding the sciences matters: research leads to discoveries that will improve lives for years to come.
Creating a model organism out of a little-known weed sparked a vision for the future, leading many bright minds to join the call and dedicate their lives to plant research and innovation. Arabidopsis research contributed to the canon of agriculture, plant science, and even human health.
Research emerges in starts and stops – what looks like a dead end to some may reveal a doorway to others. Achievements in fundamental research, like that done by Chris and Shauna Somerville, have paved a path for important discoveries, and will continue to do so into the future.
Chris Somerville, alongside Shauna Somerville, George Rédei, Elliot Meyerowitz and so many others, saw a path forward where others saw nothing. Through perseverance, they made palpable changes to the study of plants which are still felt today. All of these discoveries led to tangible improvements in our lives due to the belief in the value of focusing vast amounts of research on one plant. And it was made possible, thanks to a little-known weed.