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Transient state dynamics of Chlamydomonas reinhardtii cells during phototaxis

Sujeet Kumar Choudhary1, Yingyou Ma2, Aparna Baskaran2, and Prerna Sharma1,3,*

  • *Contact author: prerna@iisc.ac.in
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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033282 – Published 24 September, 2025

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/l53n-2kg1

Abstract

The directed movement of microorganisms toward light is called phototaxis—a fundamental process shown by many uni- and multicellular photosynthetic microorganisms for their survival and growth. Here, we determine the time-dependent response of a population of model phototactic single-celled algae Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to changing light conditions. When the condition changes from dark to light, we show that the response of a dark-adapted isotropic population depends on not just the light intensity but also the cell number density. On the other hand, when conditions change from light to dark, the time dependence of the recovery from an aligned state to an isotropic state is independent of cell density and light intensity. We find that such kinetics emerges from the coupling between flagellar dynamics, cell speed, and incident photon flux. We further show that existing minimal noninteracting models, which robustly describe the steady-state properties of populations of Chlamydomonas under given light conditions, capture this time-dependent phenomenon only for dilute suspensions.

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Phys. Rev. Research 7, 033282– Published 24 September, 2025
  • Received 23 July 2024
  • Accepted 25 August 2025
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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