This research project explores the benefits and costs of group living in Gonium pectorale and its genetic basis. Group living provides benefits such as increased body size, faster swimming, reduced predation, and better environmental buffering, but it also has costs like resource sharing and waste management.
G. pectorale is an ideal model to study group living stress due to its intermediate complexity between unicellular Chlamydomonas reinhardtii and multicellular Volvox carteri. It shows plasticity in group formation, breaking into unicells as population density rises. We focus on the rlsD gene, a stress response gene also found in C. reinhardtii. G. pectorale lacks the more complex regA-like gene cluster seen in Volvox species, making it a key organism for studying multicellularity evolution.
Our goal is to determine if group living is stressful by observing rlsD gene expression. If rlsD is expressed in groups, it indicates stress; if expressed in unicells, it suggests group living is not stressful. This research will reveal whether rlsD plays a role in group maintenance and the evolution of multicellularity, and how it has diverged from its ancestor gene, rls1.