Establishment of a Method tao Culture a Washed and Cloned Green Paramecium (Paramecium bursaria)

The green paramecium, Paramecium bursaria , widely distributed in freshwater habitats around the world, has hundreds of symbiotic green algae in its cytoplasm. P. bursaria is classified as a paramecium, a species of ciliate. Symbiotic algae cannot exist inside paramecia other than P. bursaria , like as P. tetraurelia or P. caudatum . Much interest has been accumulating in elucidating the symbiotic mechanism of symbiotic algae that can exist only inside P. bursaria . However, the basic properties related to P. bursaria and symbiotic algae have not yet been fully elucidated. Are the species of symbiotic algae in P. bursaria uniform or diverse? Are the symbiotic microorganisms in P. bursaria symbiotic algae only? Does each individual P. bursaria show physiologically similar properties regarding the rate and frequency of cell division and also in terms of longevity? Actually, many things described above still remain unanswered. In this study, after isolating, washing and cloning P. bursaria , the rate of proliferation was measured for individual cells. Although each cloned strain should have the same genetic background, we obtained interesting results showing that the proliferation rates were significantly varied among the strains.
Full-Length Paper By a grant from Research Institute for Integrated Science, Kanagawa University