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The Closest Living Relatives of Land Plants
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

The Closest Living Relatives of Land Plants

Kenneth G. Karol, Richard M. McCourt, Matthew T. Cimino and Charles F. Delwiche
Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science), v 294(5550), pp 2351-2353
14 Dec 2001
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1065156
PMID: 11743201
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://doi.org/10.1080/00472778.2019.1659676View
Published, Version of Record (VoR)Open Access (License Unspecified),  Open

Abstract

The embryophytes (land plants) have long been thought to be related to the green algal group Charophyta, though the nature of this relationship and the origin of the land plants have remained unresolved. A four-gene phylogenetic analysis was conducted to investigate these relationships. This analysis supports the hypothesis that the land plants are placed phylogenetically within the Charophyta, identifies the Charales (stoneworts) as the closest living relatives of plants, and shows the Coleochaetales as sister to this Charales/land plant assemblage. The results also support the unicellular flagellate Mesostigma as the earliest branch of the charophyte lineage. These findings provide insight into the nature of the ancestor of plants, and have broad implications for understanding the transition from aquatic green algae to terrestrial plants.

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450 citations in Web of Science
488 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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#6 Clean Water and Sanitation

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Plant Sciences
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