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Chlamydomonas Lab Report

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Introduction Human cilia play a critical part in human processes. Human cilia are hair-like projections that extend from the surface of a cell. Cilia are capable of rhythmic motion and acts together from separate strands so that the cell is capable of movement. Flagella are a whip-like structure that is found in cells as well that allow for the movement of the cell. Human cilia are characterized as having “metachronal rhythm" and this means is a rhythm that "changes time" to produce wave. The beating movement of a single cilium is exquisitely effective. The power stroke consists of beating stiffly in one direction, while during the recovery stroke the cilium is pulled back in floppy fashion close to the cell surface, thereby offering …show more content…

Chlamydomonas has two anteriorly inserted whiplash flagella that are similar to human cilia and contain the same flagella as humans. Chlamydomonas also is not a new model organism, meaning that there are many different mutant strains that have unique characteristics from one another. Those unique characteristics sometime mimic environments inside the body and can be used to see how the body will react to the variable without actually affecting a patient. Victor Stolc and his colleagues recognized that cilia play critical roles in animal physiology and development. They need to identify the gene products necessary for ciliary assembly and function by running a proteomic analysis of human cilia. However, the proteomic analysis of human cilia is limited in its ability to detect low-abundance proteins. Comparative genomics was used to identify genes found only in the genomes of organisms with cilia and flagella and was successful. This study was then implemented to find the low-abundance proteins of human cilia. Stolc now found a use for the Chlamydomonas because one, it has similar flagella or cilia to humans, two, most known components of cilia and flagella are strongly induced during flagella regeneration in Chlamdomonas and three, most of the identified human ciliary disease genes have orthologs in Chlamydomonas that have been shown to be involved in

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