Chlamydomonas Resource Center

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Project Summary This award renews support for a collection of 2300 strains of the unicellular green alga consisting of mutants of C. reinhardtii and closely related species. Chlamydomonas is an excellent model system for studies of photosynthesis, flagellar biogenesis and function, signal transduction, and other aspects of cell biology. The recent completion of the genome sequence of Chlamydomonas will likely accelerate the adoption of this organism as an experimental tool. The collection, now called the Chlamydomonas Resource Center (formerly, the Chlamydomonas Genetics Center at Duke University), serves as the central repository to receive, catalogue, preserve and distribute wild type and mutant cultures of C. reinhardtii and other Chlamydomonas species in which extensive genetic analysis has been done. It also serves as the resource center to disseminate information on this organism to the international scientific community. Given its ease of culture and striking flagellar motility, Chlamydomonas is also an ideal organism for laboratory exercises for high school students and college undergraduates. Thus, the Center also provides materials and advice for students and teachers interested in adopting Chlamydomonas for classroom and individual science projects. In addition to live cultures, the Center also maintains and distributes molecular reagents useful for research on Chlamydomonas, including genomic and cDNA clones of Chlamydomonas nuclear, chloroplast and mitochondrial genes, and cDNA libraries. A web site [http://www.chlamy.org] provides descriptions of all cultures in the collection, historical information and reference material on genetic loci and mutant alleles, genetic and molecular maps, an address directory, and an extensive bibliography.