What did the algae that gave rise to the first land plants look like? A research team led by the University of Göttingen and including the universities of Maastricht and Innsbruck and Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales has now taken a detailed look at one of the most important groups for answering this question: the Zygnematophyceae, the closest living algal relatives of land plants. These include familiar-looking filamentous algae such as Spirogyra, as well as many that just consist of single cells. Despite their relatively simple appearance, they are particularly important for understanding plant evolution due to their close relationship with land plants.

What did the algae that gave rise to the first land plants look like? A research team led by the University of Göttingen and including the universities of Maastricht and Innsbruck and Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales has now taken a detailed look at one of the most important groups for answering this question: the Zygnematophyceae, the closest living algal relatives of land plants. These include familiar-looking filamentous algae such as Spirogyra, as well as many that just consist of single cells. Despite their relatively simple appearance, they are particularly important for understanding plant evolution due to their close relationship with land plants.

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  • crandlecan@lemmy.zip
    1·
    6 hours ago

    The more diversity we include, the more we see that evolution was not a simple progression from single-celled algae to increasingly complex plants. Instead, different lineages experimented with different body plans and molecular solutions over hundreds of millions of years. Understanding this diversity is crucial if we want to reconstruct the biology of the algal ancestors from which land plants emerged."