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The global population urgently requires alternative food sources that provide the micronutrient-rich profile of meat and fish but with lower environmental cost. We present a solution in the form of ‘Naked Clams’ (teredinids/shipworms) - a seldom researched group of bivalves, that feature tiny shells and live in and feed on wood, turning it into protein and essential nutrients. We report the first pilot system for Naked Clam aquaculture, the first nutritional profile and feeding efficacy assessment, and demonstrate value offered by microencapsulated feeds in fortifying Naked Clams. Naked Clams were rich in nutrients including vitamin B₁₂and monounsaturated fatty acids, and shared the high protein content of conventional bivalves such as blue mussels (Mytilus edulis). Microencapsulated algal feeds enriched the Naked Clams with essential PUFAs including EPA and DHA, with potential for further tailoring. Additional work is required, but this study represents a gateway to a new form of sustainable food production.

 

Green plants (Viridiplantae) include around 450,000–500,000 species of great diversity and have important roles in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Here, as part of the One Thousand Plant Transcriptomes Initiative, we sequenced the vegetative transcriptomes of 1,124 species that span the diversity of plants in a broad sense (Archaeplastida), including green plants (Viridiplantae), glaucophytes (Glaucophyta) and red algae (Rhodophyta). Our analysis provides a robust phylogenomic framework for examining the evolution of green plants. Most inferred species relationships are well supported across multiple species tree and supermatrix analyses, but discordance among plastid and nuclear gene trees at a few important nodes highlights the complexity of plant genome evolution, including polyploidy, periods of rapid speciation, and extinction. Incomplete sorting of ancestral variation, polyploidization and massive expansions of gene families punctuate the evolutionary history of green plants. Notably, we find that large expansions of gene families preceded the origins of green plants, land plants and vascular plants, whereas whole-genome duplications are inferred to have occurred repeatedly throughout the evolution of flowering plants and ferns. The increasing availability of high-quality plant genome sequences and advances in functional genomics are enabling research on genome evolution across the green tree of life.