Land plants' closest algal relatives evolved multicellular growth repeatedly, genetic analysis suggests

What did the algae that gave rise to the first land plants look like? A research team led by the University of Göttingen and including the universities of Maastricht and Innsbruck and Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales has now taken a detailed look at one of the most important groups for answering this question: the Zygnematophyceae, the closest living algal relatives of land plants. These…