Streptophyte alga

Chara braunii

Chara braunii is a streptophyte algae that exhibits several distinctive characteristics, making it significant from both an evolutionary and biological perspective:

Complex Morphology: C. braunii has a multicellular body structure with specialized tissues, resembling the complexity of early land plants. It possesses differentiated regions such as nodes and internodes, along with branching filaments.
Close Relation to Land Plants: Phylogenetically, C. braunii is part of the Charophytes, one of the closest group to land plants (Embryophytes), making it a key species for understanding the evolution of terrestrial plants.
Reproductive Features: C. braunii exhibits oogamy, where it produces large non-motile eggs and small motile sperm. This is an advanced reproductive strategy compared to other algae and mirrors the reproductive system of early land plants.
Apical Growth: Like land plants, C. braunii grows from an apical meristem, a feature linked to the development of complex body plans and tissue differentiation.
Plasmodesmata: C. braunii cells are connected by plasmodesmata, which facilitate intercellular communication, a characteristic crucial for tissue and organ development in land plants.
Genome: The genome of C. braunii provides insights into key evolutionary innovations, such as genes associated with hormone signaling, stress responses, and cell wall formation, which were essential for the transition to terrestrial life.

These features highlight Chara braunii as a model organism for studying the evolutionary steps leading from aquatic algae to the complex land plants we see today.

The available Chara braunii S276 genome v1 was published at Nishiyama et al. 2018.

Genome assembly stats

	Scaffold stats
Genome Assembly size (Mbp)	1750.99
Number of scaffolds	11427
Number of scaffolds >= 2Kbp	5979
N50	234
Scaffold L50 (Mbp)	2.26
Longest scaffold (Mbp)	14.23

Taxonomy

Kingdom	Viridiplantae
Phylum	Streptophyta
Class	Charophyceae
Order	Charales
Family	Characeae
Genus	Chara
Species	Chara braunii

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