2025/02/07 by Jaccoline Zegers, Lukáš Pfeifer, Tatyana Darienko +7 · 1 voice
Medicine · #Spaceflight effects on biology
paper · doi:10.1101/2025.02.06.636795
openalex publication_date 2025/02/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22
ABSTRACT Zygnematophytes are the closest algal relatives of land plants. They hold key information to infer how the earliest land plants overcame the barrage of terrestrial stressors, prime of which is osmotic stress. Here, we applied two osmotic stressors on a unicellular and a multicellular representative of zygnematophytes and studied their response over a 25-hour time course generating 130, 60, and 30 of transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic samples combined with photophysiology, sugar analysis, immunocytochemical glycoprotein analysis, and microscopy. Our data highlight a shared protein chassis that shows divergent responses with the same outcome: successful acclimation to osmotic challenges. We establish a model of how the algal sisters of land plants can overcome a prime stressor in the terrestrial habitat and highlight components of the plant terrestrialization toolkit.