bio

Streptophyte algae

The freshwater green algae that are the closest living relatives of every land plant. This is one of modern botany's most important corrections: land plants did not emerge from marine seaweed or kelp, but from modest organisms living at the margins of fresh water. Sequencing a thousand plant genomes identified the nearest sister group as the Zygnematophyceae — the conjugating algae you find in pond scum — and their genomes already carried much of the toolkit for terrestrial life before anything came ashore.