Golden Age of Discovery

"We are now in a 'golden age' of discovery in plant biology. Problems that have been intractable for decades are yielding to the application of modern methods in molecular and cellular biology. The forumla for much of the success is conceptually simple: Isolate a mutation that affects the process or structure of interest, clone the gene, find out where and when it is expressed, where the gene product is located, what it does, and what it interacts with, directly or indirectly .... Although it is not necessarily easy, any gene that can be marked by a mutation can be cloned. This is a qualitatively different situation from anything that has ever before existed in plant biology."

—From Arabidopsis, E. Meyerowitz and C.Somerville, eds., Cold Spring Harbor Press, 1994.