title: Prochlorophyta - a matter of class distinctions.
abstract: Prochloron (a marine symbiont) and Prochlorothrix (from freshwater plankton) contain chlorophylls a and b; Prochlorococcus (common in marine picoplankton) contains divinyl-chlorophylls a and b. Like cyanophytes they are all clearly photosynthetic prokaryotes, but since they contain no blue or red bilin pigment they were assigned to a new algal sub-class, the Prochlorophyta. However, since their possible phylogenetic relationships to ancestral green-plant chloroplasts have not received support from molecular biology, it now seems expedient to consider them as aberrant cyanophytes.
authors.affiliation: Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California (San Diego), La Jolla, CA, 92093-0202, USA, rlewin@ucsd.edu.
authors.forename: Ralph A
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Lewin