Dear Chlamy net,
On behalf of the Bell lab I'm responding to postings by
Bill Birky and Patrick Ferris about interspecific crosses,
not with any useful information but with the comment that
we too are interested in the topic and are working on a
Chlamy field ecology approach. We (mostly Hans Kollewijn -
a post-doc whose surname I hope I didn't misspell) took
soil samples from 3 transects in agricultural fields
where we found C. reinhardtii (unicellular flagellate things
which mated with lab strains of one mating type or the other,
produced viable zygotes and have lots of both TOC1 and Gulliver,
two transposons isolated from C reinhardtii) this summer. Our
intention is to see whether there is any relationship between
distance separating isolates and their interfertility, and if
so on what scale this occurs. Ideally we would like to
determine how prevalent the sexual cycle is in their "natural"
history, whether there really are only two mating types
and whether there are such things as genetically discrete
species of Chlamydomonas. We would appreciate any advice or
suggestions regarding assays of genetic relatedness which
can reasonably be performed on large numbers of isolates; for
example, one current idea is to compare abundance and locations
of transposons, or perhaps the TANC satellite DNA recently
cloned by Anil Day, using PCR.
Cliff Zeyl
B7JM at MUSICB.MCGILL.CA
