Characean plants provide an excellent experimental system for electrophysiology and physiology due to: (i) very large cell size, (ii) position on phylogenetic tree near the origin of land plants and (iii) continuous spectrum from very salt sensitive to very salt tolerant species. A range of experimental techniques is described, some unique to characean plants. Application of these methods provi...

In biology, scientific discoveries are often linked to technical innovations made possible by an inspired choice of model organism. Ciliate species, especially Tetrahymena thermophila, have had historically significant roles as uniquely enabling experimental systems. More importantly, as the chapters in this volume attest, ongoing efforts of the T. thermophila model organism community have crea...

Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum) fibers are single-celled seed coat hairs that elongate up to 2mm per day during a phase of rapid growth. Recent evidence suggests this growth is orchestrated by a series of events which includes temporary closure of plasmodesmata.

D ebate over the smallest eye requires a definition of what makes an eye. The answer to this question, generally given by those considered authorities, is that an eye is an organ that receives and recognises light and has the ability to define spatial detail. Specifically, an eye can compare the amount of light coming from different directions. This definition means that an unusual collection o...

The motion of swimming micro-organisms that have a preferred direction of travel, such as single-celled algae moving upwards (gravitaxis) or towards a light source (phototaxis), is modelled as the continuous limit of a correlated and biased random walk as the time step tends to zero. This model leads to a Fokker-Planck equation for the probability distribution function of the orientation of the...