Ribosomal proteins play an important role in the development and plant physiology.
Actually, little is known about the spatial and temporal expression, the number of gene copy of each subfamily. Mapping members of these multigene families could help to have a pattern expression of each gene and to determine their role in plant development. The accumulation of an important amount of Arabidopsis thaliana DNA sequence due to the sequencing program and development of specialised software make easy selection of gene-specific TAG and mapping of multigene families. We identified 300 genes and physically mapped one hundred and forty of the Arabidopsis ribosomal protein genes. We showed that genes are distributed, like in rice over all the genome, with a bias toward chromosome 2 and 5.