Viridiplantae and Algae

Malcolm A. O'Neill; Alan G. Darvill; Marilynn E. Etzler; Debra Mohnen; Serge Perez

doi:10.1101/glycobiology.3e.024

Viridiplantae and Algae

Review

In: Essentials of Glycobiology [Internet]. 3rd edition. Cold Spring Harbor (NY): Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press; 2015. Chapter 24.

2017.

Authors

Malcolm A. O'Neill, Alan G. Darvill, Marilynn E. Etzler, Debra Mohnen, Serge Perez

Book Editors

Book Affiliations

¹ Distinguished Professor of Medicine and Cellular & Molecular Medicine, Co-Director, Glycobiology Research and Training Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
² Professor of Surgery, Director, National Center for Functional Glycomics, Harvard Medical School, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA
³ Distinguished Professor of Cellular & Molecular Medicine, Co-Director, Glycobiology Research and Training Center, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
⁴ Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Chair and Professor of Cell Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, New York, New York, USA
⁵ Professor and Chairman of Biological Chemistry, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
⁶ Professor of Mycology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
⁷ Regents Professor and Director, Complex Carbohydrate Research Center, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA
⁸ Professor, Laboratory of Immunoglycobiology, WPI Immunology Frontier Research Center, Osaka University, Osaka, Japan
⁹ Professor of Glycoproteomics and Glycomics, Macquarie University and Institute for Glycomics, Griffith University, Sydney, Australia
¹⁰ Professor and Eminent Scholar, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA
¹¹ Professor, Departments of Pharmacology and Neuroscience, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA
¹² Director, Max-Planck-Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, Potsdam, Germany

Excerpt

Recent research on plant glycan structure and function has typically emphasized model plants such as Arabidopsis and plants of commercial importance. However, there is increasing interest in studying the glycans produced by plants from all the major orders of the Viridiplantae. Such studies, together with the availability of transcriptomic data for numerous green algae and land plants, have begun to reveal a rich diversity in glycan structures and insight into how some of these structures have changed during the evolution of the Viridiplantae. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the current knowledge of green plant glycan structures with an emphasis on the features that are unique to land plants.

Viridiplantae (green plants) are a clade of photosynthetic organisms that contain chlorophylls a and b, produce and store their photosynthetic products inside a double-membrane-bounded chloroplast, and have cell walls that typically contain cellulose. The Viridiplantae are comprised of two clades—the Chlorophyta and the Streptophyta. The Chlorophyta contain most of the organisms typically referred to as “green algae.” The term “algae” is also used for several other groups of photosynthetic eukaryotes, including diatoms and the red, brown, golden, and yellow-green algae. The Streptophyta comprise several other lineages that are also referred to as “green algae” and the land plants. Land plants include the liverworts, mosses, hornworts, lycopods, ferns, gymnosperms, and flowering plants.

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