Physcomitrella Patens

Physcomitrella patens, commonly called spreading earthmoss, is a moss in the family Funariaceae that colonizes exposed mud and earth around the edges of pools of water, with a disjunct distribution across temperate regions worldwide apart from South America. As a haploid bryophyte with highly efficient homologous recombination, it can be used to directly assay gene targeting within weeks by PCR, a trait rarely available in multicellular organisms, which has made it a model organism for studying plant evolution, development, and physiology. Its roughly 500-megabase-pair genome, spread across 27 chromosomes, was fully sequenced in 2008, and the species has since been used in biotechnology research, including surviving 283 days outside the International Space Station in 2022.