Conducting research in polar regions is still a significant challenge because of issues with access and working at subfreezing temperatures. Yet, polar environments are home to significant biological diversity, including diverse primary producers. As photosynthesis on land is limited by permafrost and glaciers, marine phytoplankton groups and, especially, diatoms underpin most of the polar food web (Boyd, 2002;Horner et al., 1992;Smetacek, 1999). Diatoms can cope well with low temperatures and significant seasonality, including the long and dark polar winter (McMinn & Martin, 2013). Although global warming appears to diminish the dominance of diatoms in polar oceans (Ardyna & Arrigo, 2020), diatoms are still a significant driving force in terms of underpinning polar food webs and global biogeochemical cycles (Hop et al., 2020).Fragilariopsis cylindrus is an obligately coldadapted (psychrophilic) pennate diatom found in Arctic and Antarctic seawater and sea ice (Figure 1). It is considered a keystone species for polar waters, thriving under diverse polar conditions and forming blooms in sea ice and at the sea-ice edge (Hop et al., 2020). As a polar indicator species, F. cylindrus actively thrives under high salinity, low temperatures, and semienclosed sea-ice systems (Kang & Fryxell, 1992). In this perspective paper, we provide a brief overview on the work that has been done so far on F. cylindrus and discuss its role as a model alga to understand coldadapted life.The genome of Fragilariopsis cylindrus, published in 2017 (Mock et al., 2017), was the first sequence of a cold-adapted eukaryote. In recent years, whole genome sequences of several additional polar algal species have followed suit, such as genomes from dinoflagellates, chlorophytes, and prasinophytes (
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