A scanning electron micrograph of the picozoan Picomonas judraskeda
MICHAEL MELKONIAN
Picozoans have puzzled scientists ever since their surprising discovery almost 15 years ago. These common, globally distributed microbes are barely bigger than bacteria, yet they’re members of the same domain as animals, fungi, and plants, and everything from what they eat to where they fit into the eukaryotic tree of life has proven difficult to pin down.
Now, a preprint uploaded to bioRxiv on April 14 claims to have found these perplexing microbes an evolutionary home. But the paper, which is currently undergoing peer review, suggests picozoans aren’t done surprising scientists. If the authors’ conclusions are right, then these microbes are indeed algae, even though they seem to lack the group’s most notable feature: plastids, a group of organelles that includes chloroplasts.
The 2007 Science paper that announced the discovery of this group of plankton rocked the field of microbial ...
