Assessments of the phylogeny of the green algal class Chlorophyceae using standard, single markers, such as 18S rRNA and rbcL, have generally been unable to match the robust trees produced from analyses of chloroplast genomic data. Buchheim et al. study the orders Chaetophorales, Oedogoniales and Chaetopeltidales and demonstrate that sequence-structure analysis of ITS2 yields results that are largely congruent with those from genomic data. The technique thus provides an economical supplement or alternative to the single-marker approaches used in green algal phylogeny.
