Papanin Institute for Biology of Inland Waters Russian Academy of Science, Borok 152742, Russia; Laboratory of Cellular and Molecular Protistology, Zoological Institute Russian Academy of Science, Saint Petersburg 199034, Russia.
Department of Botany, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, V6T 1Z4, British Columbia, Canada.
Eur J Protistol. 2021 Feb;77:125758. doi: 10.1016/j.ejop.2020.125758. Epub 2020 Nov 20.
Recent progress in understanding the early evolution of eukaryotes was tied to morphological identification of flagellates and heliozoans from natural samples, isolation of their culture and genomic and ultrastructural investigations. These protists are the smallest and least studied microbial eukaryotes but play an important role in the functioning of microbial food webs. Using light and electron microscopy, we have studied the diversity of heterotrophic flagellates and centrohelid heliozoans from marine waters of Curacao (The Netherlands Antilles), and provide micrographs and morphological descriptions of observed species. Among 86 flagellates and 3 centrohelids encountered in this survey, five heterotrophic flagellates and one сentrohelid heliozoan were not identified even to the genus. Some flagellate protists have a unique morphology, and may represent undescribed lineages of eukaryotes of high taxonomic rank. The vast majority (89%) of identified flagellates is characterized by wide geographical distribution and have been reported previously from all hemispheres and various climatic regions. More than half of the species were previously observed not only from marine, but also from freshwater habitats. The parameters of the species accumulation curve indicate that our species list obtained for the Curacao study sites is far from complete, and each new sample should yield new species.
近年来，对真核生物早期进化的理解的进展与从自然样本中鉴定鞭毛虫和放射虫、对其培养物进行分离以及对其基因组和超微结构进行研究有关。这些原生动物是最小和研究最少的微生物真核生物，但在微生物食物网的功能中起着重要作用。使用光和电子显微镜，我们研究了来自库拉索岛（荷属安的列斯群岛）海水的异养鞭毛虫和中心体放射虫的多样性，并提供了观察到的物种的显微照片和形态描述。在这项调查中遇到的 86 种鞭毛虫和 3 种中心体放射虫中，有 5 种异养鞭毛虫和 1 种中心体放射虫甚至无法鉴定到属。一些鞭毛虫原生动物具有独特的形态，可能代表未被描述的高分类等级的真核生物谱系。大多数（89%）已鉴定的鞭毛虫具有广泛的地理分布，并以前曾在所有半球和各种气候区域报告过。超过一半的物种以前不仅在海洋中，而且在淡水中都有观察到。物种积累曲线的参数表明，我们为库拉索研究地点获得的物种列表还远远不够完整，每个新样本都应该产生新的物种。
