Volvox

What is Volvox? The name comes from the Latin volvere, to roll, and ox, as in atrox, fierce. Volvox is a spherical multicellular green alga, which contains many small biflagellate somatic cells and a few large, non-motile reproductive cells called gonidia, and swims with a characteristic rolling motion. Ever since van Leeuwenhoek first viewed these algal ‘fierce rollers’ with utter fascination in 1700, one biologist after another has pointed to Volvox as a model organism that could be used to support or refute some important biological concept of the day, such as spontaneous generation, preformation, epigenesis, the continuity of the germ plasm, and so on. All attempts to exploit Volvox as a laboratory model system failed, however, until the 1960s, when Richard Starr’s group finally discovered a medium in which the organism would thrive and reproduce in captivity. Starr then circled the globe, bringing into culture all 18 known (and several previously unknown) Volvox species. By 1970, he concluded that a mating pair of isolates of V. carteri from Japan had the best combination of properties to serve as a genetic model system. Most studies of Volvox reported in the last 30 years have used those strains of V. carteri or their descendants, and so this guide will be similarly restricted in scope.