Viridiplantae

Uncommon card · No. 197478

Viridiplantae (New Latin for "green plants"), also known as kingdom Plantae sensu stricto ("plants in a narrow sense"), is a clade of mostly autotrophic eukaryotes that constitutes the largest group within the predominantly photosynthetic superclade Archaeplastida, with around half a million known species that include all green algae and land plants (embryophytes, which evolved from freshwater green algae known as streptophytes). They are important primary producers in both aquatic (marine and freshwater) and terrestrial ecosystems, and are significant contributors to the Earth's oxygen, carbon and water cycles. Compared to the archaeplastidian sister groups Rhodaria (red algae, rhodelphidians and picozoans) and Glaucophyta ("grey algae"), Viridiplantae are unique in that almost all members (with the exception of parasitic plants and the heterotrophic algae Prototheca) have chloroplasts with both chlorophyll a and chlorophyll b (the latter absent in other archaeplastidians) but lack phycobiliproteins...

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