Much of my work in over the last few years has been with a unicellular alga called Chlamydomonas reinhardtii. We call it “Chlamy” for short. In 2015, I published a comparative genomics study on Chlamy in which I found that all of the most commonly used laboratory strains of the species represent a mosaic of two highly divergent ancestors. The upshot of this work is that there was a great deal more genetic diversity than anyone had suspected. As part of this work, I wrote a program to generate a strain-specific genome assembly and annotation file for any strain. This program is called the Custom Chlamy Generator, and is available from my bitbucket repository.
Sean Gallaher, PhD 