Sustaining the Chlamydomonas Resource Center

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This award to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities supports the operation of the Chlamydomonas Resource Center (CRC), which maintains and distributes resources supporting research on the unicellular green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. Chlamydomonas is a unique eukaryotic model system for studying photosynthesis, flagellar motility, and many other basic processes, and is an increasingly employed algal system for applied research bioenergy and biofuels. Chlamydomonas has also proven to be a powerful teaching tool, which the Center encourages by providing a library of simple classroom experiments, and inexpensive kits with cells and supplies for experiments in secondary and post-secondary schools. For more than 40 years, with NSF support, the CRC has provided the expertise and resources needed by researchers to use this powerful model system for research and teaching. The Chlamydomonas Resource Center (CRC) is the only comprehensive source for materials and information needed to use the eukaryotic green alga Chlamydomonas in biological research. Support from this three year award will allow the CRC to: 1) maintain and distribute the collection of Chlamydomonas mutants, bacterial clones, and reagents that form the core of the collection; 2) acquire, catalogue, maintain and distribute new mutant and wild-type strains and bacterial plasmids provided by the Chlamydomonas community; and 3) to provide teaching kits and experimental protocols to educators and students.Because Chlamydomonas retains key ancestral features of animal and plant cells, including a photosynthetic apparatus much like that of higher plants, as well as ciliary motility characteristic of metazoans, the intellectual impact of Chlamydomonas research is remarkably broad. The CRC maintains and supplies more than 70,000 mutant and wild-type strains of Chlamydomonas, along with cDNA and genomic DNA libraries, kits for genetic mapping, reagents for cell growth and kits and lab protocols for teaching in secondary and post-secondary classrooms. The CRC maintains all mutant and wild-type Chlamydomonas strains on both agar plates or slants and maintains two copies of the mutant collection frozen in liquid nitrogen. Most orders are filled within two days. The CRC also maintains a comprehensive website (chlamycollection.org) that provides a storefront to order items from the CRC collections, but also provides up-to-date information on commonly used techniques for Chlamydomonas research, genetic and molecular maps of the genome, tools for teaching and news of interest to the Chlamydomonas research community. The CRC staff ensures the availability of mutants generated by Chlamydomonas researchers by encouraging users to add their mutants to the collection upon publication, and by accepting strains and strain collections from individual researchers. The Chlamydomonas research community world-wide depends on this unique resource to continue and expand research on this valuable model system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.