The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Coleochaete is a genus of small freshwater green algae that form flat, disc-shaped mats on stones and on aquatic plants in streams worldwide. It is a close relative of land plants and is easy to culture, so it is used as a model organism in research.
Coleochaete is a genus of parenchymatous charophyte green algae in the order Coleochaetales. They are haploid, reproduce both sexually and asexually, and have true multicellular organisation, with plasmodesmata communicating between adjacent cells. The plants form flat, sprawling discs on solid surfaces in freshwater streams worldwide, usually as epiphytes on aquatic plants or growing on the surface of stones. They are seen as one of two most probable sister groups to land plant species, the second candidate group being the Characeae. The issue is still not resolved. As they show some of the earliest and simplest features of multicellular plant growth, they are ideal model organisms in the field of synthetic biology. They are easy to culture and techniques that have been used to study Arabidopsis thaliana are now being applied to Coleochaete.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Coleochaete by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
