Origin of land plants using the multispecies coalescent model

Characterization of the Heterotrimeric G-Protein Complex and Its Regulator from the Green Alga Chara braunii Expands the Evolutionary Breadth of Plant G-Protein Signaling

“…The charophyte green algae are especially interesting from an evolutionary perspective, since they are the closest living relatives of the ancestors of the embryophytes (Becker and Marin, 2009; Niklas and Kutschera, 2010;Wodniok et al, 2011;Laurin-Lemay et al, 2012;Timme et al, 2012;Raven, 2013;Zhong et al, 2013). Superficially, these algae (e.g.…”

Statistical binning enables an accurate coalescent-based estimation of the avian tree

“…Three summary methods-the greedy consensus, matrix representation with parsimony (MRP) (35), and maximum pseudo-likelihood estimation of species trees (MP-EST) (13)-were applied to simulated avian and mammalian data sets by using the site-only multilocus bootstrapping procedure (34) [see (36) for a discussion of more elaborate approaches for bootstrapping multilocus data sets]. We chose MP-EST because it is statistically consistent under the multispecies coalescent model, has been used in several studies (6,(37)(38)(39), and had better accuracy than other summary methods in some studies (13). However, the greedy consensus is inconsistent under the multispecies coalescent (40), and MRP and concatenation may also be inconsistent (11).…”

Green Algae and the Origins of Multicellularity in the Plant Kingdom

“…This view has been corroborated and refined using molecular phylogenetics that have begun to clarify relationships within charophyte algae and with their sister clade, the land plants (embryophytes) (Turmel et al 2002;Finet et al 2010;Wodniok et al 2011;Laurin-Lemay et al 2012;Timme et al 2012;Zhong et al 2013).…”

“…Moreover, the fossil record of charophyte algae is incomplete and does not extend earlier than that of land plants, so is not a reliable source of information on timing for emergence of early embryophytes whose earliest fossils appear 500 million years ago ). As noted above, the charophyte algal order that is most closely related to land plants is unresolved, but it is clear that the most developmentally complex order, Charophyceae (stoneworts), is probably not the closest relative of the embryophyte lineage (Wodniok et al 2011;Laurin-Lemay et al 2012;Timme et al 2012;Zhong et al 2013). Despite this ambiguity and the likelihood of both character loss and gain in the extant charophyte algal orders, some of the steps leading to multicellularity in the embryophytes can still be inferred.…”