Features unique to protists

Protists vary greatly in organization. Some are single-celled; others are syncytial (coenocytic; essentially a mass of cytoplasm); and still others are multicellular. (While protists may show multicellularity, they are never multitissued.) They may manifest as filaments, colonies, or coenobia (a type of colony with a fixed number of interconnected cells embedded in a common matrix before release from the parental colony). Not all protists are microscopic. Some groups have large species indeed; for example, among the brown algal protists some forms may reach a length of 60 metres (197 feet) or more. A common range in body length, however, is 5 μm (0.0002 inch) to 2 or 3 mm (0.08 or 0.1 inch); some parasitic forms (e.g., the malarial organisms) and a few free-living algal protists may have a diameter, or length, of only 1 μm.

While many protists are capable of motility, primarily by means of flagella, cilia, or pseudopodia, others may be nonmotile for most or part of the life cycle. Resting stages (spores or cysts) are common among many species, and modes of nutrition include photosynthesis, absorption, and ingestion. Some species exhibit both autotrophic and heterotrophic nutrition. The great diversity of protist characteristics supports theories about the antiquity of the protists and of the ancestral role they play with respect to other eukaryotes.

The architectural complexity of most protist cells sets them apart from the cells of plant and animal tissues. Unicellular protists are complete independent organisms, and they must compete and survive as such in the environments in which they live. Adaptations to particular habitats over prolonged periods of time have resulted in both intracellular and extracellular elaborations seldom, if ever, found at the cellular level in higher eukaryotic species. Internally, for example, complex rootlet systems have evolved in association with the basal bodies, or kinetosomes, of many ciliates and flagellates, and nonhomologous endoskeletal and exoskeletal structures have developed in many protists. Conspicuous food-storage bodies are often present, and pigment bodies apart from, or in addition to, chloroplasts are found in some species. In the cortex, just under the pellicle of some protists, extrusible bodies (extrusomes) of various types (e.g., trichocysts, haptocysts, toxicysts, and mucocysts) have evolved, with presumably nonhomologous functions. Scales may appear on the outside of the body, and, in some groups, tentacles, suckers, hooks, spines, hairs, or other anchoring devices have evolved. Many species have an external covering sheath, which is a glycopolysaccharide surface coat sometimes known as the glycocalyx. Cyst or spore walls, stalks, loricae, and shells (or tests) are also common external features.

Protists cannot be divided perfectly into algae, protozoa, and fungi. As a result, the protists are spread across the major conventional algal and fungal classifications (in kingdom systems) and the eukaryotes generally (in the three-domain system). Examples of protists include various unicellular red algae, such as Cyanidioschyzon merolae; unicelluar green algae, such as Chlamydomonas reinhardtii; and marine diatoms, such as Thalassiosira pseudonana. Protozoans, such as photosynthetic euglenoids, free-living dinoflagellates, amoeboids (e.g., foraminiferans), radiolarians, and volvox, are other common protists.