An international team of scientists led jointly by the Universities of Göttingen and Cologne has deciphered the evolutionary history of zygnematophytes. Their results reveal the internal relationships in this group of algae using state-of-the-art phylogenomic analyses and pinpoint the emergences of algal multicellularity. The results have been published in the article "A phylogenomically informed five-order system for the closest relatives of land plants," in the journal Current Biology.