The single, ancient origin of chromist plastids.

ABSTRACT: Algae include a diverse array of photosynthetic eukaryotes excluding land plants. Explaining the origin of algal plastids continues to be a major challenge in evolutionary biology. Current knowledge suggests that plastid primary endosymbiosis, in which a single-celled protist engulfs and "enslaves" a cyanobacterium, likely occurred once and resulted in the primordial alga. This eukaryote then gave rise through vertical evolution to the red, green, and glaucophyte algae. However, some modern algal lineages have a more complicated evolutionary history involving a secondary endosymbiotic event, in which a protist engulfed an existing eukaryotic alga (rather than a cyanobacterium), which was then reduced to a secondary plastid. Secondary endosymbiosis explains the majority of algal biodiversit

SUBMITTER: Yoon HS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC137747 | biostudies-literature | 2002 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature