Reduced blog output

I know I’ve been quiet lately, with posts coming irregularly and posts that require much thought even more rarely. This is largely due to the fact that I started a new job in January, and my schedule is not as flexible as it once was. I’m also an employee of the federal government now, and as such subject to restrictions on my political activities. Fierce Roller has always been pretty light on the political content, but I have occasionally written about politics. I want to retain the freedom to do so, so I think it’s prudent to keep my blogging activities entirely separate from my job.

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Phycological Society of America 2020 meeting cancelled

PSA logo

Well, my summer travel plans just got downsized. Hot on the heels of Chlamy 2020 deadlines extended, the PSA meeting in Providence, Rhode Island is cancelled:

Greetings fellow phycologists,

I think that we can all agree that the greatest strength of our society is the fantastic folk of which it is comprised. We have members from around the planet, at every stage of professional development, all unified by our love of all things algal. Thus, it is with a heavy heart that after consultation with, and on behalf of, the Executive Committee, we have decided to cancel the meeting in Rhode Island this year for several Covid-19 related reasons.

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Chlamy 2020 deadlines extended

Chlamy 2020

This is straight from the Chlamy 2020 mailing list:

Due to the COVID-19 epidemics, the organizers of Chlamy 2020, the 19th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas, have decided to push all deadlines by 24 days. The early bird registration rates will be available until April 24, i.e. one month before the start of the conference. We hope that this will give you enough time to make an informed decision about your participation to Chlamy 2020. Please visit our website https://chlamy2020.sciencesconf.org for all details on this top-notch meeting.

If you are tempted to participate, please do pre-register now, without paying. It will help us keep track of who would be interested to attend. This way you will receive all the information in due time, and be able to manage travel arrangements so as to benefit from the currently low air fares. Payment of registration fees is suspended for the moment, until we see clearer into our future. But you can deposit your abstract any time. The selection of talks from abstracts is scheduled to take place between April 7 and April 15.

Note that we have pledged to NOT cancel the meeting, whatever happens. At worst, we will postpone it, without changing the location.

Hope to see you at Chlamy 2020 !

The Chlamy 2020 organization committee.

Billion-year-old green algae

Proterocladus antiquus

Figure 2g from Tang et al. 2020. Proterocladus antiquus. Scale bar 200 μm.

Researchers from Virginia Tech and the Chinese Academy of Sciences have described some billion-year-old fossils that they interpret as green algae. What’s interesting about these fossils, aside from being older than previously known green algal fossils, is that they appear to be fully multicellular, with differentiated cells. This is a valuable find, because it shows that at least one of the many green algal lineages that have independently evolved multicellularity did so relatively early. Sadly, the article, in Nature Ecology & Evolution, is paywalled. The best I can do is link to the article’s page on ResearchGate, which has a read-only version. I requested a full-text through that page, and the lead author sent a pdf promptly.

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Meet Eudorina compacta!

Nozaki et al. 2020 Fig. 2A & B

Fig 2A & B from Nozaki et al. 2020. Light microscopy of Eudorina compacta Nozaki sp. nov. originating from Lake Victoria. (A) Surface view of 32-celled vegetative colony showing compactly arranged cells. (B) Optical section of 32-celled vegetative colony showing a hollow structure.

Hisayoshi Nozaki and colleagues have described another new species of volvocine algae, a member of the genus Eudorina from Lake Victoria in Tanzania. Unlike most species in this genus, the cells of Eudorina compacta are tightly packed around the surface of the colony, which is ellipsoidal. They coexist in Lake Victoria with Colemanosphaera charkowiensis, another species that Dr. Nozaki and colleagues described in 2014.

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Volvox videos by Shigeru Gougi

Shigeru Gougi (@sgougi on Twitter) has a YouTube channel of video microscopy, including several videos of Volvox:

There’s a good mix of developmental stages here: juveniles (smaller spheroids with nothing visible inside), reproductive age asexual colonies (larger spheroids with small green dots, which are asexual reproductive cells called gonidia), mature asexual colonies (with small spheroids inside that will eventually “hatch” out to become juveniles), and pregnant females (containing yellowish zygotes that will mature into desiccation-resistant spores). I’m not sure about the species ID, but with such a large number of cells, they’re probably in the section Volvox (sometimes known as Euvolvox): [Read more…]

“Flocking” Volvox in the Regeneron Science Talent Search

Balasubramanian Fig 3 A&B

Figure 3 A&B from Balasubramanian 2018. (a) V. barberi flock where 56 colonies gathered over several minutes and rotated coherently and rapidly in the culture well. (b) Schematic of flock in panel a.

In 2017, Ravi Balasubramanian, a student from Harriton High School in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, presented a talk and a poster on “flocking” behavior in Volvox barberi at the Fourth International Volvox Meeting in St. Louis. In 2018, Balasubramanian posted a preprint of his work to bioRxiv. Now his work has earned him a place among the top 300 scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2020, “the nation’s oldest and most prestigious science and math competition for high school seniors.”

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