Pleodorina inversion

Stephanie Höhn and Armin Hallmann have published a detailed study of the developmental process of inversion in Pleodorina californicaPleodorina is one of the two genera we usually refer to as ‘partially differentiated’ (the other is Astrephomene), meaning that some of their cells are specialized for motility and never reproduce (soma) and some perform both motility and reproductive functions. P. californica is pretty big, up to about 1/3 of a millimeter, easily visible to the naked eye (though you’d need better vision than mine to make out any details).

Stephanie Höhn sampling a pond near Cambridge University during the Volvox 2015 meeting.

Stephanie Höhn sampling a pond near Cambridge University during the Volvox 2015 meeting.

Like all members of the family Volvocaceae, P. californica undergoes complete inversion during development:

After the completion of the cell division phase and before inversion, the embryos of Gonium, Pandorina, Eudorina and Pleodorina consist of a bowl-shaped cell sheet, whereas the embryonic cells of Volvox form a spherical cell sheet. With exception of the genus Astrephomene, all multicellular volvocine embryos face the same “problem”: the flagellar ends of all the cells point toward the interior of the bowl-shaped or spherical cell sheet rather than to the exterior, where they need to be later to function during locomotion. [References removed]

[Read more…]

Volvox 2017 – save the date

The Fourth International Volvox Conference will be held in St. Louis, Missouri August 16-19, 2017, with Jim Umen organizing.

Starting in 2011, we have had a Volvox meeting every other year (every year there’s not a Chlamydomonas meeting, that is). The first meeting was at Biosphere 2 outside of Tucson, Arizona, the second at the University of New Brunswick, and the third at Cambridge University.

Biosphere 2

Biosphere 2, the site of the First International Volvox Meeting in 2011.

You don’t have to study Volvox to join us; the meeting is open to anyone with an interest in the evolution of multicellularity (last year’s invited speaker was Professor Pauline Schapp, who studies cellular slime molds).

[Read more…]

Volvox live wallpaper for Android

Anybody remember iGoogle? Kind of a customizable home page for your web browser. I used it until they shut it down, and I even spent a few hours designing a Volvox iGoogle theme (when I should have been writing my thesis):

igoogle

I think three or four people used it; Google would only tell me “less than 100.” Nevertheless, if you feel the need for some Volvox in your life but you don’t have a handy supply of AF-6 medium, lighted incubator, and dissecting scope, there’s still a way:

We have a good news for all VOLVOX fans. You can grow VOLVOX on your smartphone!

[Read more…]

What kind of individual do you mean?

One of the discussions I find most interesting in the philosophy of science is about what exactly constitutes a biological individual (or organism). The discussion would be a lot less interesting if everything were a vertebrate. Vertebrates (nearly always) develop from a single fertilized egg, so the (mostly) genetically homogeneous and (usually) genetically unique unit is the same as the spatially bounded, contiguous and physiologically integrated unit (this doesn’t even cover all the proposed criteria; see Clarke 2010 for a fairly comprehensive list with citations). But when we look outside of the vertebrates, what we often find is that some biological units have some of these properties and either groups or parts of those units have others.

Aphid on dandelion by Amoceann. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

Aphid on dandelion by Amoceann. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

[Read more…]