The plant Arabidopsis thaliana is known to most as a weed (if known at all!) but is actually one of the handful of ‘model organisms’ used by scientists to explore the secrets of life. Each year an ever increasing number of papers are published sharing the research of hundreds of scientists worldwide into this ordinary plant.
This animation is a representation of the expansion of human knowledge embodied in this research.

Produced with the assistance of Gordon Simpson, Dundee University & The James Hutton Institute, Dundee, Scotland

Music credit:

The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan by Chris Zabriskie, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License.