Spreading Earthmoss

Spreading earthmoss, Physcomitrella patens, is a small moss of the family Funariaceae, an early colonist of exposed mud and bare earth around the edges of ponds and pools across temperate regions worldwide except South America. It has become one of the most important model organisms in plant biology because of its unusually efficient capacity for homologous recombination, which lets researchers precisely knock out individual genes to study their function, and its genome, comprising roughly 500 million base pairs across 27 chromosomes, was fully sequenced in 2008; its spores have also been used in spaceflight experiments, surviving hundreds of days exposed outside the International Space Station.