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SUMMARY:Adaptive Phototaxis and Evolutionary Transitions to Multicellulari
 ty - Raymond Goldstein (DAMTP)
DTSTART:20220929T123000Z
DTEND:20220929T133000Z
UID:TALK178073@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Oliver Shorttle
DESCRIPTION:101 lectures take place once per term\, and cover topics in pl
 anetary science and life in the Universe. All lectures start at 1:30pm and
  are preceded by lunch (from 12:30pm).\n\nAbstract: One of the most fundam
 ental issues in biology is the nature of the driving forces that underlie 
 evolutionary transitions from unicellular to multicellular organisms. Volv
 ocine green algae serve as model organisms for this problem\, as they span
  from the unicellular biflagellate Chlamydomonas to multicellular species 
 of Volvox that can have up to 50\,000 Chlamydomonas-like cells arranged on
  the surface of a spherical extracellular matrix. In these species\, the m
 echanism of phototaxis is of particular interest since the organisms have 
 neither a nervous system nor intercellular cytoplasmic connections\; the a
 bility to steer is therefore a consequence of the response of individual c
 ells to light. In this talk I will discuss experimental and theoretical st
 udies of the mechanism of phototaxis in Chlamydomonas\, Gonium (a 16-cell 
 organism with a plate-like structure) and Volvox which\, take together\, i
 llustrate the existence of an evolutionarily conserved tuning between the 
 adaptive timescale for flagellar photoresponse and the period of organism 
 rotation around a body-fixed axis. These results give insight into the cel
 lular changes necessary in evolutionary transitions to multicellularity.
LOCATION:Martin Ryle Seminar Room\, Kavli Institute
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