Former Master’s Student David Ferranti, now in the doctoral program at UC San Diego just published the work from his thesis in the Journal of Phycology:
Ferranti, D.A. and Delwiche, C.F. (2024) Investigating the evolution of green algae with a large transcriptomic data set. J Phycol. 10.1111/jpy.13509
https://doi.org/10.1111/jpy.13509
David was originally supposed to be doing bench work, but the pandemic hit during his second semester, so he turned to data analysis. The paper presents a 1323-gene analysis of 62 Viridiplantae, including 31 novel transcriptomes spanning the diversity of green algae. As with other recent, multi-gene phylogenies it supports the placement of Zygnematophytes as the sister taxon to embryophytes, but finds some contradictory signal regarding the placement of Charophyceae sensu stricto. We were not able to determine the source of the contradictory signal, but note that the Zygnematophyceae have unusually broad variation in codon usage and amino acid composition.