The private life of brown algae: illuminating the origins and evolution of multicellular sexual development

Brown algae are multicellular eukaryotes that have been evolving independently from animals and plants for more than a billion years. Brown algae have invented a fascinating diversity of body patterns and reproductive characteristics, whose molecular basis remains totally unexplored. We are using the richness of morphological and sexual features of these enigmatic organisms to shed light into the origin of multicellularity and the evolution of sex determination across the eukaryotic tree of life.