Arabidopsis thaliana, also known as thale cress, is widely used as a model system — an organism used to study similar processes in other organisms — in plant biology.
The plant serves as a useful model because it is closely related to crops like turnips, cabbage, broccoli and canola and mimics systems in other plants like corn; is easy to care for; has a small genome with limited complexity; and has a fast life cycle that allows researchers to quickly observe the impact of their experiments.
Other model systems include yeast, fruit flies, mice and nematodes.