Green microalgae for several decades have been produced for commercial exploitation, with applications ranging from health food for human consumption, aquaculture and animal feed, to coloring agents, cosmetics and others. Several products from green algae which are used today consist of secondary metabolites that can be extracted from the algal biomass. The best known examples are the carotenoi...

We have constructed a phylogenic tree for green plants by comparing 5S rRNA sequences. The tree suggests that the emergence of most of the uni- and multicellular green algae such as Chlamydomonas, Spirogyra, Ulva, and Chlorella occurred in the early stage of green plant evolution. The branching point of Nitella is a little earlier than that of land plants and much later than that of the above g...

Plastids and mitochondria each arose from a single endosymbiotic event and share many similarities in how they were reduced and integrated with their host. However, the subsequent evolution of the two organelles could hardly be more different: mitochondria are a stable fixture of eukaryotic cells that are neither lost nor shuffled between lineages, whereas plastid evolution has been a complex m...

We modified the stable isotope mixing model MixSIR to infer primary producer contributions to consumer diets based on their fatty acid composition. To parameterize the algorithm, we generated a 'consumer-resource library' of FA signatures of Daphnia fed different algal diets, using 34 feeding trials representing diverse phytoplankton lineages. This library corresponds to the resource or produce...

Rates of grazing on phytoplankton by macrozooplankton (cladocerans and copepods > 220 μm in length) and microzooplankton (animals < 220 μm, mostly rotifers and nauplii) were determined for Lake Champlain on three occasions using a modified version of the Lehman-Sandgren method. Gradients in grazer density were created in fertilized cubitainers incubated in situ, and clearance rates on specific ...

The functional analysis of neuronal circuitry would be facilitated if researchers were able to control, over extended periods of time, the activity of genetically defined populations of neurons in vivo. New work using light-gated cation channels from green algae offers hope that this might soon be possible.

Research by Peter Narins et al. suggests that the neural processes that come into play when humans are ‘‘tricked’’ by ventriloquists may also elucidate the neural processes of aggressive behavior in amphibians. Cross-modal spatial integration in the brain ‘‘binds’’ separate auditory and visual cues over a limited temporospatial range, and such integration is involved in the processing of sound ...

Five blue-green and one red algal species produced carbon monoxide during photosynthetic growth. The blue-green algae synthesized CO and phycocyanobilin in equimolar quantities at identical rates. The red alga, Porphyridium cruentum, incorporated Delta-aminolevulinic acid-5-(14)C into phycoerythrobilin and CO. The ratio of the specific radioactivity of phycoerythrobilin to that of CO, and the k...

Enrichment from local fishponds led to the isolation of a bacterium capable of lysing many species of unicellular and filamentous blue-green algae, as well as certain bacteria. The isolate is an aflagellate, motile rod which moves in a gliding, flexuous manner; the organism is capable of digesting starch and agar, but not cellulose and gelatin. Its deoxyribonucleic acid base pair composition (p...