TY - JOUR
TI - Future prospects for investigating ciliate biodiversity
AU - Rajter, Ľubomír
AU - Lu, Borong
AU - Rassoshanska, Erika
AU - Dunthorn, Micah
TI - Future prospects for investigating ciliate biodiversity
AB - Ciliates have a long history of being central in evolutionary and ecological studies on eukaryotic microorganisms. Although thousands of species have been discovered, their total diversity still remains unknown. Here, we will discuss two unsolved problems that hinder the further exploration of ciliate diversity at the species level, and potential solutions to these problems are proposed. First, ciliate morphospecies are difficult to identify because the different silver stains are not scalable (they do not represent high-throughput methods) and basic supplies are lacking (e.g., protargol); a solution may be the development of fluorescent staining techniques. Second, ciliate phylogenetic species are difficult to identify because of extensive paralogy in nuclear-protein-coding genes; a solution may be to concentrate on sequencing mitochondrial genomes. These two approaches could be integrated into a high-throughput fluorescent-single-cell sorting and mitochondrial genomes sequencing process that would enable the observation and better understanding of ciliate species on a massive scale.
VL - 2022
IS - Volume 61
PY - 2022
SN - 0065-1583
C1 - 1689-0027
SP - 35
EP - 46
DO - 10.4467/16890027AP.22.005.16236
UR - https://ejournals.eu/en/journal/acta-protozoologica/article/future-prospects-for-investigating-ciliate-biodiversity
KW - Biodiversity
KW - Ciliophora
KW - fluorescence
KW - staining methods Review Article Address for