Systems genetics in photosynthetic microbes

Plants are indispensable for life on earth, and form the direct basis for all human nutrition, ecology and feedstock. Nevertheless, the plant kingdom is under-explored compared to animals. My lab aims to accelerate our understanding of photosynthetic organisms. We use the haploid unicellular green algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii that has a plant-like gene set, but diverged from land plants before genome duplications occurred in the land plant lineage. These unique aspects allowed me to develop during my postdoctoral studies, novel genome-wide, unbiased technologies, applied for the first time in plants. In my new lab, we continue to develop clever large-scale tools to investigate how Chlamydomonas cells actively maintain their size. Cell size has immense impact both on the whole organism’s growth and development, as well as on cellular fitness and function. Despite the importance of this topic, the mechanisms that allow cells to sense their size have not yet been resolved. One reason for this knowledge gap is the challenges in performing accurate single-cell measurements and their interpretation. It is not trivial to deduce from a genetic or chemical perturbation whether the effect is an association or the root cause, as there is no easy way to disentangle contributions from nutrition, differentiation, and cell division. Chlamydomonas has unique physiological features that make it an ideal playground for addressing these fundamental questions. We therefore harness its potential as a common and powerful model system to address interdisciplinary problems at the forefront of plant cell biology.