The Chlamydomonas nuclear genome

Chlamydomonas has become a premier model organism thanks to the ease with which gene function can be analyzed experimentally. With the advent of genome and transcriptome sequencing, generating an accurate assembly of the genome and correctly annotating the structure of genes has become an essential goal for the Chlamydomonas research community. Here, we review the history of the field and present in detail the most recent description of the genome and its genes, to be released during the summer of 2022. We further describe the genome from a structural perspective and discuss genomic variation among Chlamydomonas laboratory strains and field isolates. Genomics is an ever-evolving field, and we expect that the description of the genome will be continuously enriched as new tools develop and more strains are analyzed.