The Green Yeast, Part 1 – Chlamydomonas reinhardtii glory shots

So now, I’ve finally arrived at this single-celled alga, Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, affectionately called “chlamy”, which I’ve observed in puddle water alongside the more spectacular colonial species.

This being probably the single most heavily-studied alga in history, I felt it deserved itself a good series of blog posts to cover all of the different aspects of its biology, history, applications and my personal connections to it.

But before then, here are some of the shots I’ve managed to capture of C. reinhardtii in situ, or in its natural habitat:

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii from puddle water, imaged at 100x.

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is quite numerous in many of the puddles that Eudorina and Pandorina also inhabit, and like those two algae it tends to swim towards and cluster in the most strongly-lit area of a sample. This picture was taken at one end of a drop of water after about 2 minutes of letting it sit on the microscope slide, after which all of the chlamy had swarmed to that end, stopped swimming so erratically, and were easier to photograph.

Chlamydomonas reinhardtii, imaged at 400x.

As is evident at the closer magnifications, the cells of chlamy aren’t just uniform blobs of green (some species of algae unfortunately do just look like that, and they’re an absolute pain to try and identify by eye alone). In my next post, I plan to cover the basic anatomy of a cell of C. reinhardtii so that these features become more obvious and meaningful as I continue my discussion of the alga. Then, I’ll do an in-depth research post to dig up some of the history of C. reinhardtii. After that, I’ll cover some of the biggest areas of biology in which chlamy is currently being used, hopefully one post per topic. And finally, I’ll legitimately discuss my lab work for the first time on this blog as I show my own cultures of this alga and explain in brief my plans for them, both currently and as I move into college (the latter is of course subject to change). In between these posts, I’ll sandwich in some other interesting finds from my puddle water samples, including the colonial alga Gonium and hopefully the giant ciliate Bursaria truncatella. Lots of good stuff planned for the next couple of weeks. Stay tuned.