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).

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.

[10] However, under a higher light intensity of 90 μE with 5% CO2 applied through bubbling, the growth rate of C. merolae can be further increased, with a doubling time of approximately 9.2 hours.

C. merolae can also be grown on gellan gum plates for purposes of colony selection or strain maintenance in the laboratory.

[10] If purer DNA is required, the Cetyl trimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) method may be employed.

[10] Total RNA may be extracted from C. merolae cells using a variant of the hot phenol method described above for DNA.

[10][16] Cells are disrupted using glass beads and vortexing in a 10% glycerol buffer containing the reducing agent DTT to break disulfide bonds within proteins.

[10] This extraction will result in denatured proteins, which can be used in SDS-PAGE gels for Western blotting and Coomassie staining.

C. merolae is sensitive to many antibiotics commonly used for selection of successfully transformed individuals in the laboratory, but it resistant to some, notably ampicillin and kanamycin.

[7] Random mutation led to several loss-of-function mutants in Ura5.3, which allowed cells to survive in the presence of 5-FOA as long as uracil was provided.

[18] The same transformation procedure as is used for transient expression can be used here, except with the homologous DNA segments to allow for genome integration.