Plants have a lot to endure. Burning heat, extreme drought, hungry insects, destructive fungi and so on. These factors create a lot of stress in a plant. Yet plants are able to withstand all this misery. Researchers in Göttingen have looked at the response to these stress factors in detail from algae and compared them to land plants.
This microscopic image shows Zygnema circumcarinatum, a filamentous, single-celled algae that is very closely related to land plants. The hundreds of algae samples were exposed to light of 10 higher intensity than in natural conditions, as well as to much higher and lower temperatures than in their normal conditions, to see how the algae respond to stress. The response to the stressors was measured through assessment of the photosynthesis efficiency.
By analyzing the stress response of the algae and comparing it to that of land plants, it became apparent that there are several shared genes between the two that play an important role in the stress response. About 600 million years ago, algae and land plants evolved in separate directions. Using these genetic data, the researchers were able to trace algae and land plants back to a shared ancestor.
Tim Rieseberg, Armin Dadras, et al., Time-resolved oxidative signal convergence across the algae-embryophyte divide, Nature Communications (2025), doi:10.1038/s41467-025-56939-y
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