to study the adaptation of this species to different environments. Distribution and habitat A. thaliana is native to Europe, Asia, and Africa, and its geographic distribution is rather continuous from the Mediterranean to Scandinavia and Spain to Greece. It also appears to be native in tropical alpine ecosystems in Africa and perhaps South Africa. It has been introduced and naturalized worldwide, including in North America around the 17th century. A. thaliana readily grows and often pioneers rocky, sandy, and calcareous soils. It is generally considered a weed, due to its widespread distribution in agricultural fields, roadsides, railway lines, waste ground, and other disturbed habitats, but due to its limited competitive ability and small size, it is not categorized as a noxious weed. Like most Brassicaceae species, A. thaliana is edible by humans in a salad or cooked, but it does not enjoy widespread use as a spring vegetable. Use as a model organism Botanists and biologists began to research A. thaliana in the early 1900s, and the first systematic description of mutants was done around 1945. A. thaliana is now widely used for studying plant sciences, including genetics, evolution, population genetics, and plant development. Although A. thaliana the plant has little direct significance for agriculture, A. thaliana the model organism has revolutionized our understanding of the genetic, cellular, and molecular biology of flowering plants. The first mutant in A. thaliana was documented in 1873 by Alexander Braun, describing a double flower phenotype (the mutated gene was likely Agamous, cloned and characterized in 1990). Friedrich Laibach (who had published the chromosome number in 1907) did not propose A. thaliana as a model organism, though, until 1943. His student, Erna Reinholz, published her thesis on A. thaliana in 1945, describing the first collection of A. thaliana mutants that they generated using X-ray mutagenesis. Laibach continued his important contributions to A. thaliana research by collecting a large number of accessions (often questionably referred to as "ecotypes"). With the help of Albert Kranz, these were organised into a large collection of 750 natural accessions of A. thaliana from around the world. In the 1950s and 1960s, John Langridge and George Rédei played an important role in establishing A. thaliana as a useful organism for biological laboratory experiments. Rédei wrote several scholarly reviews instrumental in introducing the model to the scientific community. The start of the A. thaliana research community dates to a newsletter called