Brown seaweeds are multicellular eukaryotes that have been evolving independently of animals and plants for more than a billion years. The filamentous brown alga Ectocarpus has been used as a model to understand the biology of these enigmatic organisms and to shed light on a range of major questions, from the molecular basis of complex developmental patterns to the evolution of sex.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Remy Luthringer, MPI.
References
Bringloe, T. T. et al. Crit. Rev. Plant Sci. 39, 281–321 (2020).
Coelho, S. M. & Cock, J. M. in The Evolution of Multicellularity 1–24 (CRC Press, 2022).
Müller, D. Nature 203, 1402–1402 (1964).
Charrier, B. et al. New Phytol. 177, 319–332 (2008).
Charrier, B., Le Bail, A. & de Reviers, B. Trends Plant Sci. 17, 468–477 (2012).
Arun, A. et al. eLife 8, e43101 (2019).
Godfroy, O. et al. Plant Cell 29, 3102–3122 (2017).
Macaisne, N. et al. Development 144, 409–418 (2017).
Badis, Y. et al. New Phytol. 231, 2077–2091 (2021).
Cock, J. M. et al. Nature 465, 617–621 (2010).
Baudry, L. et al. Genome Biol. 21, 148 (2020).
Gueno, J. et al. Nucleic Acids Res. 50, 3307–3322 (2022).
Delaroque, N., Maier, I., Knippers, R. & Müller, D. G. J. Gen. Virol. 80, 1367–1370 (1999).
Ahmed, S. et al. Curr. Biol. 24, 1945–1957 (2014).
Luthringer, R. et al. Repeated co-option of HMG-box genes for sex determination in brown algae and animals. Science (in the press).
Acknowledgements
I thank past and present members of my lab and the Ectocarpus research community, including Akira Peters and Mark Cock, for their intellectual contribution and for working together to build Ectocarpus as an experimental system. I thank Dieter Müller and Colin Brownlee for their generosity and inspirational discussions. I thank the Max Planck Society, the CNRS, Sorbonne Université, the ANR, the ERC (grant no. 864038 and 638240), the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation and the Moore Foundation for supporting our research on Ectocarpus and other brown algae.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The author declares no competing interests.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Coelho, S.M. The brown seaweed Ectocarpus. Nat Methods 21, 363–364 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02198-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02198-6
- Springer Nature America, Inc.