Another DJ Volvox
Zach Grochau-Wright, a Ph.D. student in Rick Michod’s lab, sent me a few instances of “Random things named Volvox“. I hadn’t heard of any of these:
Volvox is a popular name!
Fierce Roller
Evolution, transitions, and volvocine algae
Another DJ Volvox
Zach Grochau-Wright, a Ph.D. student in Rick Michod’s lab, sent me a few instances of “Random things named Volvox“. I hadn’t heard of any of these:
Just what the headline says: early registration for The Fourth International Volvox Conference ends May 19th. After that, prices go up $100 for everybody. The registration fees sound a bit steep (up to $650), but when you consider that they include meals, lodging, and transportation between the hotel and the conference, they’re not bad at all:
Registration is open for the Fourth International Volvox Conference in St. Louis, MO, August 16-19. The deadline for early registration is May 19, after which prices go up $100.
Dr. Ahna Skop (@foodskop) tweeted this video from Christian Linkenheld:
Volvox aureus at 40x, 100x, and 400x. That is all.
Last time, I wrote about Julian Huxley’s 1912 book, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom, and his use of the volvocine algae as an example. I liked most of what he had to say, though I took issue with his assertion that
…all the other members of the family except Volvox…are colonies and nothing more—their members have united together because of certain benefits resulting from mere aggregation, but are not in any way interdependent, so that the wholes are scarcely more than the sum of their parts.
This is, of course, a matter of how we define a multicellular organism, but I think any definition that excludes, for example, Eudorina, is not a very useful one.
This time, I’ll look at the rest of what Huxley had to say about the volvocine algae, most of which is about Volvox:
Julian Huxley was one of the biologists responsible for the merging of Mendelian genetics and Darwinian evolution in the early 20th century, the modern synthesis. His most influential work was Evolution: The Modern Synthesis, published in 1942. Thirty years earlier, though, he published a book on biological individuality, The Individual in the Animal Kingdom. Thankfully, the copyright on this book has expired, so it is now part of the public domain, and a scanned version is available for free in pdf and epub versions from Google.
Any book with Volvox on the cover can’t be all bad!
I’m set up to receive alerts when a few Wikipedia pages update, and I noticed an unusual amount of activity on the Volvox page. Turns out someone has been vandalizing the article. At one point, the first line read
”Volvoxiousmaximous”, discovered by Paul Hirn in 1869, is a polyphyletic blue jeans in the volvocine rainbow algae clade…
Alexey Desnitskiy from Saint Petersburg State University has published a new review of sexual development in the genus Volvox in the International Journal of Plant Reproductive Biology.
The article includes an up-to-date review of Professor Desnitskiy’s own work describing four developmental “programs” in the various species of Volvox:
The website for the Volvox 2017 conference is up at www.volvox2017.org. Registration isn’t open yet, but there’s some information about the venue, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis. The meeting is set for August 16-19, 2017.
The goal of the International Volvox Conference is to bring together international scientists working with Volvox and its relatives (aka Volvocales or volvocine algae). We cordially invite experimentalists and theorists interested in these fascinating organisms.
I’ll keep you posted!
The following guest post was kindly provided by Dr. Kimberly Chen. I have edited only for formatting.
MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are a class of non-coding small RNAs that regulate numerous developmental processes in plants and animals and are generally associated with the evolution of multicellularity and cellular differentiation. They are processed from long hairpin precursors to mature forms and subsequently loaded into a multi-protein complex, of which the Argonaute (AGO) family protein is the core component. The small RNAs then guide the protein complex to recognize complementary mRNA transcripts and conduct post-transcriptional gene silencing.