In this paper, published in 2015 in The Plant Cell, I performed a comparative genomics study of all of the commonly used strains of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. In this work, I discovered that dozens of the most frequently studied strains are a mosaic of two ancestral strains that are approximately 2% different at the genetic level (similar to the difference between humans and chimpanzees), and that this high degree of variation affects phenotype diversity in a way that is largely underappreciated. To address this, I developed a tool, called the Custom Chlamy Generator, that allows researchers in the field to perform ‘omics studies that are tailor-made to the strains that they use. You can read more about that here.
Sean Gallaher, PhD 