Abstract

Choosing the most convenient model organism, to unravel biological and physiological questions, is an issue whose importance was already recognized at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Over the last decades, we learned that in several cases, the selection of a particular organism was serendipitous rather than scrupulously planned, and more unexpectedly some of their advantageous features were only subsequently unveiled. The usage of aquatic model organisms, starting from the unicellular Acetabularia and then later with Volvox and up more recently with choanoflagellates (i.e., Monosiga, Salpingoeca) has significantly contributed to dissecting many pivotal questions in the field of cell biology ranging from finding a functional role to the nucleus up to surveying the evolution of multicellularity. In the recent past, we have witnessed their genome sequencing and more recently the possibility to transfect many unicellular aquatic organisms -protists- letting to surmise their usage as novel potential model organisms to explore and scrutinize unaddressed biological issues.

Keywords:Eukaryotes; Cell biology; Nucleus; Biological issues; Developmental biology; Pathogen