Abstract
Hidden beneath the ocean along many stretches of the coastline are luxuriant forests of brown seaweeds. These organisms have an atypical evolutionary history compared with the more commonly studied organisms in biology. The brown algae are members of the stramenopiles (or heterokonts), which diverged from other major eukaryotic groups, such as green plants, animals and fungi, well over a billion years ago (Yoon et al., 2004; Baldauf, 2008). As a result, the brown algae exhibit many unusual and interesting metabolic, developmental and cell-biological features. The recent analysis of the complete genome sequence of the filamentous brown alga Ectocarpus silicilosus has provided some important clues about how these features were acquired and the molecular mechanisms that underlie them (Cock et al., 2010).
