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Updated: Jun 27, 2026

Mating and Tetrad Separation of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii for Genetic Analysis
Published on: August 13, 2009
The Chlamydomonas genome reveals the evolution of key animal and plant functions
Sabeeha S Merchant1, Simon E Prochnik, Olivier Vallon
1Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Abstract:
Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a unicellular green alga whose lineage diverged from land plants over 1 billion years ago. It is a model system for studying chloroplast-based photosynthesis, as well as the structure, assembly, and function of eukaryotic flagella (cilia), which were inherited from the common ancestor of plants and animals, but lost in land plants. We sequenced the approximately 120-megabase nuclear genome of Chlamydomonas and performed comparative phylogenomic analyses, identifying genes encoding uncharacterized proteins that are likely associated with the function and biogenesis of chloroplasts or eukaryotic flagella. Analyses of the Chlamydomonas genome advance our understanding of the ancestral eukaryotic cell, reveal previously unknown genes associated with photosynthetic and flagellar functions, and establish links between ciliopathy and the composition and function of flagella.
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