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The first plans to come up with ways to live on land accomplished that feat some 580 million years ago.

But how did they make the jump from water to terraferma?

It looks like they might have had help from bacteria.

To better understand the evolution of land plants,

researchers looked at the DNA of two species of algae.

Why algae? Well, because land plants evolved from this green goo.

For their study, the team focused on a group of algae known to be the closest living relatives of land plants.

The scientists compare the genomes of the two algae species to both land plants and other

types of algae.

The goal? To locate any important genetic similarities.

And the researchers actually discovered some significant matches between the algae species and land plants. For example, a gene family called

grass, G-R-A-S. And we were curious where that particular family came from because it had already been studied before and was known to be important

handling desiccation or dry conditions. Gain Wong, a professor in biological sciences at the University of

Alberta in Edmonton, and one of the study leaders.

And so when we looked across, we search for similar genes in all species, every known species that's ever been sequenced.

And the only place that they were found beyond algae and land plants

was bacteria and in particular, soil bacteria.

And so that's one of the key points to suggest that it was

transferred from bacteria. The study was published in the journal Cell. The

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