I continue to be interested in understanding molecular/cellular mechanics involved in traversing natural life cycle changes in phenotype. My research partner is the little known unicellular eukaryote, the water mold Blastocladiella emersonii. This organism furnishes exceptional material for undertaking such investigations. The organism undergoes growth without undergoing cell division. there are two life cycle transitions that involve stark, dramatic alterations in cellular phenotype, one transition involving exit from the multinucleate, immotice growth phase, followed by the abrupt generation and release of populations of completely different, uninucleate, motile, cell wall-less cells, and the other transition involving the "rapid change" act of the latter cells to immotile, walled cells, as a life cycle prelude to re-entering the growth phase. Each of these two life cycle transitions is accompanied by radical rearrangements of intracellular structure. The second transition is traversed on schedule without apparent requirements for concurrent protein synthesis. I seek to understand the signaling mechanisms and cytoskeletal mechanics involved in these life cycle transitions.

Graduate students currently supervised:

None.

Recent publications:

In progress:

Lima, A.A. Lodi, W.R. and D.R. Sonneborn. Morphogenetic Perturbations of the Blastocladiella emersonii Life Cycle Induced by Cytoskeletal Depolymerizing Drugs.

Gottschalk, W.K. and D.R. Sonneborn. Alternatively started developmental progressions to the same phenotypic end point (Blastocladiella emersonii zoospore encystment): A novel form of developmental memory and evidence for post-initiation pathway cross-talk.

Gottschalk, W.K. and D.R. Sonneborn. Extracellular cAMP and cGMP mediate phenotypically distinctive initiations and conditional blocks of Blastocladiella zoospore encystment.