Protistan Diversity in Environmental Molecular Surveys

摘要: Marine protists include a heterogeneous collection of phototrophic and heterotrophic unicells covering wide cell size range belonging to virtually all eukaryotic lineages. They have been identified by microscopy, which allows reasonable level resolution for the larger specimens but is clearly insufficient smallest ones. Moreover, as occurs with their prokaryotic counterparts, large majority marine are uncultivable. Molecular tools revolutionized field studies protists’ diversity, allowing exhaustive species inventories especially when combined high-throughput sequencing technologies. These surveys shown that natural assemblages very diverse, including novel phylogenetic lineages had remained uncharacterized despite evident ecological significance. The extent diversity novelty largest within assemblage protists, picoeukaryotes. information gathered marker genes has an array complementary molecular methods such fingerprinting study changes along spatial temporal gradients, fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) put face on perform specific counts, metagenomics explore adaptations basis genetic potential. This chapter presents overview approaches currently applied gain knowledge function environment.