Abstract
Morphogenesis of ciliated protists attracts a lot of attention, because their huge morphological diversity is related to formation of ciliary structures during cell division. In the present work, the morphology and morphogenesis as well as the phylogenetic position of a new, marine hypotrich ciliate, Nothoholosticha luporinii n. sp., were investigated. The new species is characterized by having a combination of the following features: a bicorona whose anterior row contains four frontal cirri and posterior row includes only two cirri, a single buccal cirrus, midventral complex composed of about 30 cirral pairs, one pretransverse cirrus, 3–6 transverse cirri, one left and one right marginal cirral row; three bipolar dorsal kineties; contractile vacuole located in about 2/3 of the body length, two types of cortical granules, and many macronuclear nodules scattered throughout the cytoplasm. The morphogenesis of N. luporinii follows the ontogenetic mode of Pseudokeronopsis, a well-known and closely related genus except that the macronucleus fuses into a single mass in the middle fission stage. Phylogenetic analyses based on the rDNA operon classify Nothoholosticha in the family Pseudokeronopsidae and support the distinctness of the new taxon as well as the monophyletic origin of the subfamily Nothoholostichinae.
Highlights
IntroductionCiliates (phylum Ciliophora Doflein, 1901), a highly diverse and ubiquitously distributed group of unicellular microbial eukaryotes, play substantial roles in various ecosystems
Ciliates, a highly diverse and ubiquitously distributed group of unicellular microbial eukaryotes, play substantial roles in various ecosystems
We focus on the hypotrich family Pseudokeronopsidae, which was established by Borror and Wicklow (1983)
Summary
Ciliates (phylum Ciliophora Doflein, 1901), a highly diverse and ubiquitously distributed group of unicellular microbial eukaryotes, play substantial roles in various ecosystems. Apoholosticha, Heterokeronopsis, Nothoholosticha, and Tetrakeronopsis were classified within the Nothoholostichinae, and only the three remaining genera, Antiokeronopsis, Pseudokeronopsis, and Uroleptopsis, were assigned to the Pseudokeronopsinae The monophylies of both subfamilies are supported by the cirral pattern of the bicorona, and by molecular analyses (Fan et al, 2014a; Huang et al, 2014; Paiva et al, 2014; Hu et al, 2015; Li et al, 2016)
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