A cold-inducible transposon called Jordan has previously been used to tag and recover genes controlling key aspects of Volvox development, including the process called inversion. In a search for additional genes, we isolated 17 new inversionless mutants from cultures grown at 24 degrees (the temperature that activates Jordan transposition). These mutants were stable at 32 degrees, but generated...

Volvox barberi W. Shaw is a volvocalean green alga composed of biflagellated cells. Vovocales with 16 cells or more form spherical colonies, and their largest members have germ-soma separation (all species in the genus Volvox). V. barberi is the largest Volvox species recorded in terms of cell number (10,000–50,000 cells) and has the highest somatic to reproductive cell ratio (S ⁄R). Since they...

Volvox carteri, a simple multicellular green alga, is an attractive model for studying the genetic control of germ-soma differentiation, because each spheroid (or ‘individual’) contains only two cell types: mortal somatic cells and immortal germ cells (Kirk, 1998; Schmitt et al., 1992). A typical asexual spheroid contains 16 large asexual reproductive cells, or ‘gonidia’, just internal to a sur...

In the developing asexual embryo of Y&XX carteri the differentiation into somatic and reproductive cells is seen at the division from 32-64 cells. At this stage, 16 cells of the 32celled embryo undergo unequal cleavage, forming 16 large reproductive cells [ 1,2]. In sexual embryos developing under the influence of an inducer the differentiating cleavage is delayed in the male strain up to the f...

Sulphated glycoproteins have been implicated in the control of cell growth and differentiation: fibronectins [ 1,2]; glycoproteins in developing sea urchin embryos [3]; and a surface glycoprotein from V&ox curteri [4]. This V&ox glycoprotein, of 185 000 app. M, [4] appears to be involved in the control of the differentiation of the organism during embryogenesis. Although PAPS or APS must be inv...

Copyright: © 2016 Liew et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Recent studies reveal that relationships among the volvocine algae are more complex than was previously believed. Nevertheless, this group still appears to provide an unrivaled opportunity to analyze an evolutionary pathway leading from unicellularity (Chlamydomonas) to multicellularity with division of labor (Volvox). Significant progress in this regard was made in the past year when two genes...

Telomeres, which form the protective ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, are a ubiquitous and conserved structure of eukaryotic genomes but the basic structural unit of most telomeres, a repeated minisatellite motif with the general consensus sequence T(n)A(m)G(o), may vary between eukaryotic groups. Previous studies on several species of green algae revealed that this group exhibits at least two t...

Tandem repeats (TRs) extensively exist in the genomes of prokaryotes and eukaryotes. Based on the sequenced genomes and gene annotations of 31 plant and algal species in Phytozome version 8.0 (http://www.phytozome.net/), we examined TRs in a genome-wide scale, characterized their distributions and motif features, and explored their putative biological functions. Among the 31 species, no signifi...