Figure 1.
Variation in algal body architecture (A) and life cycles (B), as well as our working hypotheses of how these traits impact on molecular evolution (C). Reduced effective population sizes associated with increasing complexity of body architecture are likely to decrease the levels of purifying selection. For life cycles, haploid-dominant lineages are expected to have stronger selection than diploid-dominant lineages as a consequence of the masking of silenced mutations.
