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A protist (/ ˈ p r oʊ t ɪ s t / PROH-tist) or protoctist is any eukaryotic organism that is not an animal, land plant, or fungus.Protists do not form a natural group, or clade, but are a polyphyletic grouping of several independent clades that evolved from the last eukaryotic common ancestor.
Its field of study therefore overlaps with the more traditional disciplines of phycology, mycology, and protozoology, just as protists embrace mostly unicellular organisms described as algae, some organisms regarded previously as primitive fungi, and protozoa ("animal" motile protists lacking chloroplasts). [1]
Protists have been described as a taxonomic grab bag of misfits where anything that does not fit into one of the main biological kingdoms can be placed. [8] Some modern authors prefer to exclude multicellular organisms from the traditional definition of a protist, restricting protists to unicellular organisms.
Plastid types in algae and protists include: Chloroplasts: found in green algae (plants) and other organisms that derived their genomes from green algae. Muroplasts: also known as cyanoplasts or cyanelles, the plastids of glaucophyte algae are similar to plant chloroplasts, excepting they have a peptidoglycan cell wall that is similar to that ...
While not all eukaryotes have mitochondria or chloroplasts, mitochondria are found in most eukaryotes, and chloroplasts are found in all plants and algae. Photosynthesis and respiration are essentially the reverse of one another, and the advent of respiration coupled with photosynthesis enabled much greater access to energy than fermentation alone.
Chloroplasts have many similarities with cyanobacteria, including a circular chromosome, prokaryotic-type ribosomes, and similar proteins in the photosynthetic reaction center. [ 204 ] [ 205 ] The endosymbiotic theory suggests that photosynthetic bacteria were acquired (by endocytosis ) by early eukaryotic cells to form the first plant cells.
Ciliates are an important group of protists, common almost anywhere there is water—in lakes, ponds, oceans, rivers, and soils, including anoxic and oxygen-depleted habitats. [2] About 4,500 unique free-living species have been described, and the potential number of extant species is estimated at 27,000–40,000. [ 3 ]
Although protist flagella have a diversity of forms and functions, [11] two large families, flagellates and ciliates, can be distinguished by the shape and beating pattern of their flagella. [ 2 ] In the phylogenetic tree on the right, aquatic organisms (living in marine, brackish, or freshwater environments) have their branches drawn in blue ...