Cyanidioschyzon merolae

Cyanidioschyzon merolae is a small (2μm), club-shaped, unicellular haploid red alga adapted to high sulfur acidic hot spring environments (pH 1.5, 45 °C). The cellular architecture of C. merolae is extremely simple, containing only a single chloroplast and a single mitochondrion and lacking a vacuole and cell wall. In addition, the cellular and organelle divisions can be synchronized. For these reasons, C. merolae is considered an excellent model system for study of cellular and organelle division processes, as well as biochemistry and structural biology. The organism's genome was the fir