Protists (eukaryotes, excluding animals, land plants, and fungi) comprise the bulk of the eukaryotic phylogenetic tree, making their diversity essential to understanding eukaryotic evolution.

Plants evolved in a world dominated by prokaryotic and eukaryotic microbes. Underneath the surface, plant roots interact with microbes in the soil, also called the rhizosphere microbiome. Although ...

Protists are predators of bacteria, and they help shape soil communities by munching on bacteria (sorry, bacteria). Researchers knew that protists could identify prey when they were in direct contact ...

Researchers from the Earlham Institute, in collaboration with The Department of Biology at the University of Oxford, discovered three previously unrecognised lineages of the protist Bodo, each with ...

The forms of protists are as varied as they are ethereal, and all are invisible to the naked eye. For the past seven years, Kevin J. Carpenter has been researching and photographing some of these ...

In the world of microbes, organisms like viruses and bacteria get a lot of attention. But now, researchers are beginning to study other unicellular life forms, like archaea, and protists. Protists ...

From Massachusetts to Mississippi, a unicellular protist is hinting at answers about the evolution of multicellularity while raising a whole new set of questions. From Massachusetts to Mississippi, a ...

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 ...

Groove-like tracks on the ocean floor made by giant deep-sea single-celled organisms could lead to new insights into the evolutionary origin of animals, according to biologists. Groove-like tracks on ...

Being single-celled doesn’t necessarily doom a creature to a simple life. A fresh look at a long-dismissed, century-old experiment suggests that so-called primitive organisms can behave in ...

New genetic evidence builds the case that single-celled marine microbes might chow down on viruses. By Katherine J. Wu On the dinner plate that is planet Earth, there exists a veritable buffet of ...