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Sci Tech
Testing chlamydomonas' response to environmental stresses
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Complete genome of the plant's chloroplast has been sequenced and this has made it possible to test response of Chlamydomonas to environmental stresses.
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WITH THE genomes of humans and several insects, animals and crop plants mapped or sequenced, biologists are turning their attention to single-celled algae no thicker than a human hair.
The algae, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii , already are an important biological model for genetics research. Now, the complete genome of the plant's chloroplast has been sequenced by scientists at the Boyce Thompson Institute (BTI) for Plant Research located on the campus of Cornell University. The chloroplast is the area of the plant that harvests light energy. Details of the sequencing (that is, determining the base sequence of each of the ordered DNA fragments) appeared in the journal The Plant Cell.
The complete chloroplast genome sequence, says David Stern, a biologist at BTI has made it possible to test the response of Chlamydomonas to various environmental stresses. One type of environmental stress being explored, says Stern (who also is an adjunct professor of plant biology at Cornell) is that of response to phosphates.
The developed world, he says, puts too much phosphorous fertilizer on plants and crops. "It turns out that Chlamydomonas shares many of the responses to phosphate stress with crop plants. Working with Chlamydomonas, we can quickly test ways to improve tolerance or adaptation, perhaps leading to ways of engineering crop plants for the same purpose," he says. If fertilizer use were decreased, phosphorous runoff into creeks, streams and lakes might be diminished.
Phosphate leaching is a prime cause of algae blooms in lakes and ponds around agricultural areas. The algae might also one day be a source of hydrogen, a clean-burning fuel. At present, hydrogen used in fuel cells is extracted from natural gas — a nonrenewable resource. A group led by Anastasios Melis, a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, is exploring the use of Chlamydomonas as a renewable hydrogen source.
Additional applications include using Chlamydomonas chloroplast as a `bioreactor' to create, or `over-express,' a variety of novel proteins for agricultural, industrial and biomedical purposes, say researchers. Chlamydomonas plants have been useful to science in both agriculture and energy research.
In nature, the organisms are widely present in fresh and brackish water, all kinds of soils, underwater thermal vents and even under the Antarctic ice shelf. One species of Chlamydomonas sports a red pigment — as protection from solar damage -- and is found in alpine or arctic regions. These red algae create a phenomenon referred to as "red snow." "Chlamydomonas is a relatively simple organism and easy to work with," they say. .
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