The first plant-wide catalogue of the proteins produced by by the weed Arabidopsis thaliana has yielded an inventory of more than 13,000 proteins.

Although researchers have investigated the ‘proteome’ of individual compartments within plant cells, such as chloroplasts, Sacha Baginsky and his colleagues are the first to tackle the proteome of an entire plant. “Our goal was to identify all proteins that are expressed in the genome,” says Baginsky, a plant biologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.