Zygnema Archives

Spirogyra, named for its spiral arrangement of chloroplasts, is a green alga belonging to the family Zygnematophyceae - making it closely related to living land plants. Credit Cäcilia F Kunz, Tatyana Darienko, and Jan de Vries.

Deep Evolutionary History Of Land Plants’ Closest Algal Relatives

by Keith CowingNovember 6, 2026November 6, 2026

[University of Göttingen] What did the algae that gave rise to the first land plants look like?

a, Heatmap of 45 conserved microexon-tags predicted by MEPmodeler. Microexon rate is the rate of true microexons among all predicted results in the cluster. For example, green cells indicate that 100% microexons with two flanking introns are present, orange indicates all microexon sequences are parts of large exons and none of them could be considered as microexons, and the others are between 0 and 1. A gray cell indicates missing data (a microexon-tag could not be found). The numbers on the right column indicate the predicted clusters containing at least one true microexon (see ref. 80 for more detail). b, RNA-seq evidence of the 1 bp microexon in cluster 2 (x axis the genomic location, and y axis the read count). c, RNA-seq evidence of two adjacent microexons, 5 (cluster 7) and 12 bp (cluster 28). In b and c, the RNA-seq of condition p881sControl2 was used; RNA-seq read depth (blue numbers) and gene annotation are shown; blue arcs indicate introns (exon–exon junctions), and the numbers indicate the junction read counts supporting the introns. The pink arrows point to microexons. d, Exon–intron structures of microexon-tag clusters 7 and 28 in 14 plant genomes. The structure was predicted by relaxing the stringency in M. viride genome and by doing TBLASTX search in S. muscicola genome (all three copies are intronless in this microexon-tag), respectively. The others are predicted with default parameters. -- Nature Genetics

Biosignatures & Paleobiology, Genomics, Proteomics, Bioinformatics, Microbiology & Virology, Origin & Evolution of Life, Plant Biology, Press Release

Revealing The Genomic Code For The Earliest Forms Of Terrestrial Plant Life

by Keith CowingMay 3, 2024

Plant life first emerged on land about 550 million years ago, and an international research team co-led by University of Nebraska–Lincoln computational biologist Yanbin Yin has cracked the genomic code […]

Zygnema

Deep Evolutionary History Of Land Plants’ Closest Algal Relatives

Revealing The Genomic Code For The Earliest Forms Of Terrestrial Plant Life

Agentic AI Joins the Search for Extraterrestrial Signals

The Composition of M-dwarf Exoplanet Hosts: Atmospheric Parameters and O, Mg, Si, and Fe Abundances from IR Spectroscopy

An Analytical Framework for Atmospheric Tides on Rocky Planets. II. Semidiurnal Thermotidal Torque

Formamide Formation on Forsterite and Mg(OH)2.H2O

BeAR: The Bern Atmospheric Retrieval code – A GPU-accelerated Framework for Low-resolution, High-resolution, and Joint Retrievals of Exoplanet Atmospheres