The Chlamydomonas genome project: A decade on

The green alga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii is a popular unicellular organism for studying photosynthesis, cilia biogenesis, and micronutrient homeostasis. Ten years since its genome project was initiated an iterative process of improvements to the genome and gene predictions has propelled this organism to the forefront of the omics era. Housed at Phytozome, the plant genomics portal of the Joint Genome Institute (JGI), the most up-to-date genomic data include a genome arranged on chromosomes and high-quality gene models with alternative splice forms supported by an abundance of whole transcriptome sequencing (RNA-Seq) data. We present here the past, present, and future of Chlamydomonas genomics. Specifically, we detail progress on genome assembly and gene model refinement, discuss resources for gene annotations, functional predictions, and locus ID mapping between versions and, importantly, outline a standardized framework for naming genes

Which Two Heads are Better than One? Uncovering the Positive Effects of Diversity in Creative Teams

Creative teams drive the idea-economy, yet the determinants of a team's ability to create new ideas are not universally agreed upon. Group-level diversity has gained the most traction as an explanation, where a team's performance is usually attributed to diversity over observed characteristics such as race, gender, or functional expertise. Most agree that these characteristics are not especially important, but rather serve as an indicator of diversity in experiences, which is the actual mechanism that improves team ability. We formalize and test if experientially diverse groups produce more ideas. Because group assignment to projects in the field is rarely exogenous, and experiential diversity is not measured in observational data, we use a laboratory experiment to test our proposal. We find that experientially diverse teams create more ideas and also find no additional effect for gender, racial, socioeconomic, or personality diversity. Our general finding for why diversity may be important indicates that if a correlation exists between characteristic diversity and experiential diversity, the characteristically diverse team will have a higher ability. This generalization can be used to unify divergent results from prior studies and can help explain how dissimilar corporate diversity policies could be equally successful

Chlamydomonas DYX1C1/PF23 is essential for axonemal assembly and proper morphology of inner dynein arms

Cytoplasmic assembly of ciliary dyneins, a process known as preassembly, requires numerous non-dynein proteins, but the identities and functions of these proteins are not fully elucidated. Here, we show that the classical Chlamydomonas motility mutant pf23 is defective in the Chlamydomonas homolog of DYX1C1. The pf23 mutant has a 494 bp deletion in the DYX1C1 gene and expresses a shorter DYX1C1 protein in the cytoplasm. Structural analyses, using cryo-ET, reveal that pf23 axonemes lack most of the inner dynein arms. Spectral counting confirms that DYX1C1 is essential for the assembly of the majority of ciliary inner dynein arms (IDA) as well as a fraction of the outer dynein arms (ODA). A C-terminal truncation of DYX1C1 shows a reduction in a subset of these ciliary IDAs. Sucrose gradients of cytoplasmic extracts show that preassembled ciliary dyneins are reduced compared to wild-type, which suggests an important role in dynein complex stability. The role of PF23/DYX1C1 remains unknown, but we suggest that DYX1C1 could provide a scaffold for macromolecular assembly