Pretty much what the title says: the meeting review from Volvox 2015 is online early at Molecular Ecology. That only took six months! This is the final, published version. Thanks for a great meeting, and thanks to everyone who read earlier drafts!
Pretty much what the title says: the meeting review from Volvox 2015 is online early at Molecular Ecology. That only took six months! This is the final, published version. Thanks for a great meeting, and thanks to everyone who read earlier drafts!
Oana Marcu — you might remember her from the First Volvox Meeting — is looking for a postdoc to do research on Chlamydomonas at NASA Ames Research Center:
This position is for a postdoctoral fellow with experience in Chlamydomonas. The project is part of a larger DOE collaboration focused on approaches to improve biomass and lipid production in microalgae. The work will take place at the NASA Ames Research Center in California and is centered on the molecular and biochemical aspects at the core of the project.
Qualifications: strong experience with Chlamydomonas growth, mutants, biochemistry/molecular biology assays and bioinformatics experience in genomics/transcriptomics. Experience with ICP-MS is desirable. The candidate should be able to pursue independent research while interacting with a large team of scientists of various expertise. The laboratory is at NASA Ames, with local collaborations at Stanford U. and Lawrence Livermore National Labs.
Instructions for applicants are here.
Registration and abstract submission for the 17th International Conference on the Cell and Molecular Biology of Chlamydomonas (Chlamy 2016) are now open. The deadline for abstract submission is April 11th. The meeting will be at the Kyoto International Conference Center June 26-July 1. This year’s program includes a session on “Evolution, Chlamydomonadales / Volvocales.”
The meeting review for the Third International Volvox Conference is now available online at Molecular Ecology (doi: 10.1111/mec.13551). The editors warned me ahead of time that the challenge for this paper would be to make it of broad interest to the readership of Molecular Ecology, so there is a lot of background information that will be old news to members of the Volvox community.
Remember Chlamy Song? Well there’s another one…this is practically a genre!
From the Jonikas Lab at Stanford:
The worst-kept secret among Volvox researchers is that the current volvocine taxonomy is a train wreck. Within the largest family, the Volvocaceae, five nominal genera are polyphyletic (Pandorina, Volvulina, Eudorina, Pleodorina, and Volvox). Of the remaining three, two are monotypic (Platydorina and Yamagishiella). Only the newly described Colemanosphaera is monophyletic with more than one species. The extent of the problem was suspected long before it was confirmed by molecular phylogenetics, and ad hoc attempts to deal with it have led to the existence of such taxonomic abominations as ‘sections,’ ‘formas,’ and ‘syngens.’ An overhaul is called for, but it is complicated by the aforementioned loss of type cultures.
Kirsty Wan and Ray Goldstein have posted a new paper to arXiv*: “Coordinated Beating of Algal Flagella is Mediated by Basal Coupling.” The paper examines in unprecedented detail the mechanics of intracellular flagellar coordination. That’s cool and all, but first: hexadecaflagellates!
Wan & Goldstein compared algal cells with 2, 4, 8, and, yes, 16 flagella. I never knew there was such a thing. Pyramimonas cyrtoptera has 16, and its relative P. octopus has…well, you can probably guess.
Volvocine taxonomy is in a sorry state. Most nominal genera, and some nominal species, are almost certainly polyphyletic. More than once, I’ve been asked during a talk, “Why is Volvox scattered all over the tree?”
In a session chaired by Ray Goldstein, we heard about recent advances in the biophysics of Volvox and Chlamydomonas. Over the last decade or so, Volvox has proven to be an experimentally tractable model system for several questions in hydrodynamics and flagellar motility. Volvox colonies can be grown in large numbers (even by physicists!), clonal cultures have relatively little among-colony variation, and they are large enough to be manipulated in ways that most single-celled organisms can’t. Furthermore, their simple structure accommodates the kind of simplifying assumptions physicists are fond of, leading Kirsty Wan (among others at the meeting) to refer to them as “spherical cows.”
In a series of papers, Douglas Brumley and colleagues have explored flagellar dynamics in Volvox carteri. Amazingly, these studies have shown that the synchronized beating of V. carteri‘s ~1000 pairs of flagella is entirely due to hydrodynamic coupling. In other words, in spite of the apparent high degree of coordination among the flagella of separate cells within a colony, no actual coordination among cells takes place. Synchronization emerges from indirect interactions mediated by the liquid medium. An elegant demonstration of this is shown in Brumley et al.’s 2014 eLife paper, in which somatic cells were physically separated from a colony and held at various distances from each other. Despite there being no direct physical connection between the cells, they beat synchronously when close together, with a phase shift that increased with increasing cell to cell distance:
This is taking much longer than I ever expected; hopefully I can get through blogging about Volvox 2015 before registration opens for Volvox 2017!
The final session on day 1 (August 20) was chaired by Aurora Nedelcu from the University of New Brunswick. Dr. Nedelcu’s introduction emphasized some of the basic questions in evolutionary biology, aside from the origins of multicellularity and sex, on which volvocine research has provided insights: the evolution of morphological innovations, the relative importance of cis-regulatory changes vs. protein-coding changes, kin vs. group selection as competing explanations for the evolution of altruism, the evolution of soma and of indivisibility, the genetic basis of cellular differentiation, and the role of antagonistic pleiotropy (my hastily scribbled notes seem to say “antagonistic pleiotropy of olsl.” Is that supposed to be rls1? This is the cost of waiting too long to write. Maybe Aurora can clarify.).