Environmental science has clearly entered the ‘era of the microbe’ during the past decade. At no other time in our history have we so completely grasped the immensity of microbial diversity or its ...

Pac-Man, the open-mouthed face of the most successful arcade game ever, is much more well-known than any of the one-celled organisms called protists, at least among people over 30. But the first study ...

Schematic evolutionary tree of the 5 microbial species included in the study. From left to right: Trimastix marina, Paratrimastix pyriformis, Blattamonas nauphoetae, Streblomastix strix, and ...

On the dinner plate that is planet Earth, there exists a veritable buffet of viruses — an amount of biomass that is the equivalent of about 25 billion human beings. So perhaps it’s a bit baffling that ...

More than 100 years ago, a zoologist by the name of Herbert Spencer Jennings described surprisingly complex and varied avoidance behaviors in a single-celled freshwater protist known as Stentor ...

The Rhizaria is a super-group of amoeboid protists with ubiquitous distributions, from the euphotic zone to the twilight zone and beyond. While rhizarians have been recently described as important ...

Since the Victorian era, categorizing the natural world has challenged scientists. No group has presented a challenge as tricky as the protists, the tiny, complex life forms that are neither plants ...

The most common groups of soil protists behave exactly like Pac-Man: moving through the soil matrix, gobbling up bacteria according to a new article. Pac-Man, the open-mouthed face of the most ...