'Without plants on land, humans could not live on Earth. From mosses to ferns to grasses to trees, plants are our food, fodder and timber. All this diversity emerged from an algal ancestor that conquered land long ago. The success of land plants is surprising because it is a challenging habitat. On land, rapid shifts in environmental conditions lead to stress, and plants have developed an elaborate molecular machinery for sensing and responding. Now, a research team has compared algae and plants that span 600 million years of independent evolution and pinpointed a shared stress response network using advanced bioinformatic methods.'