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The brown seaweed Ectocarpus

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.

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Fig. 1: The brown alga Ectocarpus.

Remy Luthringer, MPI.

Fig. 2: The tools available for Ectocarpus and research topics being addressed using this organism.

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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.

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Correspondence to Susana M. Coelho.

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Coelho, S.M. The brown seaweed Ectocarpus. Nat Methods 21, 363–364 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02198-6

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