CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Different model organisms, such as Escherichia coli, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Caenorhabditis elegans, Drosophila melanogaster,mouse, cultured human cell lines, among others, were used to study the mechanisms of several human diseases. Since humangenes and proteins have been structurally and functionally conserved in plant organisms, the use of plants, especially Arabidopsisthaliana, as a model system to relate molecular defects to clinical disorders has recently increased. Here, we briefly review ourcurrent knowledge of human diseases of nuclear and mitochondrial origin and summarize the experimental findings of planthomologs implicated in each process.