In a session chaired by Ray Goldstein, we heard about recent advances in the biophysics of Volvox and Chlamydomonas. Over the last decade or so, Volvox has proven to be an experimentally tractable model system for several questions in hydrodynamics and flagellar motility. Volvox colonies can be grown in large numbers (even by physicists!), clonal cultures have relatively little among-colony variation, and they are large enough to be manipulated in ways that most single-celled organisms can’t. Furthermore, their simple structure accommodates the kind of simplifying assumptions physicists are fond of, leading Kirsty Wan (among others at the meeting) to refer to them as “spherical cows.”

In a series of papers, Douglas Brumley and colleagues have explored flagellar dynamics in Volvox carteri. Amazingly, these studies have shown that the synchronized beating of V. carteri‘s ~1000 pairs of flagella is entirely due to hydrodynamic coupling. In other words, in spite of the apparent high degree of coordination among the flagella of separate cells within a colony, no actual coordination among cells takes place. Synchronization emerges from indirect interactions mediated by the liquid medium. An elegant demonstration of this is shown in Brumley et al.’s 2014 eLife paper, in which somatic cells were physically separated from a colony and held at various distances from each other. Despite there being no direct physical connection between the cells, they beat synchronously when close together, with a phase shift that increased with increasing cell to cell distance:

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