The Chlamydomonas genome reveals the evolution of key animal and plant functions

Sabeeha S. Merchant, Simon E. Prochnik, Olivier Vallon, Elizabeth H. Harris, Steven J. Karpowicz, George B. Witman, Astrid Terry, Asaf Salamov, Lillian K. Fritz-Laylin, Laurence Maréchal-Drouard, Wallace F. Marshall, Liang Hu Qu, David R. Nelson, Anton A. Sanderfoot, Martin H. Spalding, Vladimir V. Kapitonov, Qinghu Ren, Patrick Ferris, Erika Lindquist, Harris ShapiroSusan M. Lucas, Jane Grimwood, Jeremy Schmutz, Igor V. Grigoriev, Daniel S. Rokhsar, Arthur R. Grossman, Pierre Cardol, Heriberto Cerutti, Guillaume Chanfreau, Chun Long Chen, Valérie Cognat, Martin T. Croft, Rachel Dent, Susan Dutcher, Emilio Fernández, Hideya Fukuzawa, David González-Ballester, Diego González-Halphen, Armin Hallmann, Marc Hanikenne, Michael Hippler, William Inwood, Kamel Jabbari, Ming Kalanon, Richard Kuras, Paul A. Lefebvre, Stéphane D. Lemaire, Alexey V. Lobanov, Martin Lohr, Andrea Manuell, Iris Meier, Laurens Mets, Maria Mittag, Telsa Mittelmeier, James V. Moroney, Jeffrey Moseley, Carolyn Napoli, Aurora M. Nedelcu, Krishna Niyogi, Sergey V. Novoselov, Ian T. Paulsen, Greg Pazour, Saul Purton, Jean Philippe Ral, Diego Mauricio Riaño-Pachón, Wayne Riekhof, Linda Rymarquis, Michael Schroda, David Stern, James Umen, Robert Willows, Nedra Wilson, Sara Lana Zimmer, Jens Allmer, Janneke Balk, Katerina Bisova, Chong Jian Chen, Marek Elias, Karla Gendler, Charles Hauser, Mary Rose Lamb, Heidi Ledford, Joanne C. Long, Jun Minagawa, M. Dudley Page, Junmin Pan, Wirulda Pootakham, Sanja Roje, Annkatrin Rose, Eric Stahlberg, Aimee M. Terauchi, Pinfen Yang, Steven Ball, Chris Bowler, Carol L. Dieckmann, Vadim N. Gladyshev, Pamela Green, Richard Jorgensen, Stephen Mayfield, Bernd Mueller-Roeber, Sathish Rajamani, Richard T. Sayre, Peter Brokstein, Inna Dubchak, David Goodstein, Leila Hornick, Y. Wayne Huang, Jinal Jhaveri, Yigong Luo, Diego Martínez, Wing Chi Abby Ngau, Bobby Otillar, Alexander Poliakov, Aaron Porter, Lukasz Szajkowski, Gregory Werner, Kemin Zhou

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2156 Scopus citations

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 ∼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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)245-251
Number of pages7
JournalScience
Volume318
Issue number5848
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 12 2007
Externally publishedYes

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General

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