The unicellular alga Chlamydomonas offers a simple life cycle, easy culture and isolation of series of mutants, established the techniques and tool kit for molecular genetics and genetics analysis. It is now becoming the model organism for studies on photosynthesis in plant, flagellar assembly and function, cell cycle and circadian rhythms, signal transduction, light perception and cell recognition. It is summarized the progress of study on Chlamydomonas as a model organism in this paper.