CharKeyS: Charophyte key genome sequencing

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Land plants are monophyletic in origin, most probably deriving from a single successful colonization of the terrestrial habitat by a freshwater charophyte alga ca. 500 million years ago. It could recently be shown that charophyte ancestors of land plants, in contrast to the green algae, carried the genetic repertoire enabling them to adapt to the environmental extremes encountered on land. To deepen our evolutionary understanding, and to meet the challenge of maintaining and improving food production, it is essential to learn which traits enabled charophyte (streptophyte) algae to evolve to land plants, adapting to one of the most drastic habitat changes conceivable.One main reason that - so far - only little attention has been paid to traits enabling environmental resilience in charophyte algae is the lack of well established model organisms. In our running DFG funded collaborative project CharMod we are thus establishing two model organisms from the Charophyceae and Zygnematophyceae, representing two of the classes most closely related to land plants. CharMod aims to identify fast growing organisms with relatively small genomes, capable to perform their life cycle in vitro under axenic conditions. In the present proposal CharKeyS we ask for funding to generate high quality genome assemblies and annotations for each of these two species.It is expected that by providing genomic and transcriptomic data for these emerging model organisms the project will help a growing scientific community to perform research on the molecular adaptations having led to the colonization of land by the ancestors of extant charophyte algae. In particular, these data will much aid the recently funded Priority Programme MAdLand.