Microbial Eukaryote Diversity and Biogeography
نویسندگان
چکیده
M icrobial ecology has come of age. Microorganisms of all types are essential participants in virtually all biogeochemical processes on earth, a realization that has developed steadily during the last half-century. Moreover, the diversity of bacteria and archaea, revealed by oceanographers and marine bacteriologists through the cloning and sequencing of genes from natural water samples beginning in the 1990s, is far greater than traditional culturebased methods had previously revealed. More recently, the early focus on bacterial and archaeal diversity has broadened to include the protists, those single-celled eukaryotes that play fundamental roles in energy flow and elemental cycling in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The photosynthetic protists, or microalgae, are producers of substantial amounts of organic matter, while the heterotrophic protists, or protozoa, are important consumers of bacteria, archaea, and other eukaryotes. Despite a wealth of information on the basic physiology of many protistan species, genetic approaches are revealing a previously unknown and presently uncultured diversity among these species, similar to findings in bacterial and archaeal ecology. Moreover, we know relatively little about how these eukaryotic species are organized into functional assemblages or how changing environmental conditions affect those assemblages. Growing information about their diversity and distribution makes protists the subject of lively arguments over their ecology and how they should be divided into species.
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