摘要
Ciliates in the class Prostomatea play an important role in the global microbial loop due to their signifcant abundances and broad feeding strategies at the foundation of food webs.Despite their importance in ecosystems,the taxonomy and systematics of this group of ciliates has long been poorly understood,with this being especially true for members of the family Lagynusidae.Here we examine four lagynusids collected from sandy beaches in China,using silver-staining and 18S rRNA gene sequencing techniques.These investigations revealed two new genera and two new species and provided details for two little known forms:Penardella marina gen.nov.,sp.nov.,Apolagynus cucumis(as reported by Penard.Études sur les infusoires d’eau douce.Georg and Cie,Genève,1922)gen.nov.,comb.nov.,Lagynus minutus sp.nov.,and Lagynus elegans(Engelmann in Z Wiss Zool 11:347-393,1862)Quennerstedt(Acta Univ Lund 4:1-48,1867).Penardella gen.nov.can be morphologically distinguished by having more than three dikinetidal perioral kineties.Apolagynus gen.nov.difers from the closely related genus Lagynus in the absence of a conspicuous neck-like region.The ciliature of Apolagynus cucumis is revealed here for the frst time,which demonstrates the classifcation of this species within Lagynusidae.Furthermore,Apolagynus binucleatus(Jiang et al.,2021)comb.nov.is established according to the new fnding.The results of our phylogenetic analyses based on the 18S rRNA gene support the establishment of two new genera and indicate that Lagynusidae is monophyletic,which further strengthens its valid taxonomic status.
基金
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China(project numbers:42276094,41976086)
Researchers Supporting Project Number(project number:RSP2023R10)King Saud University,Riyadh,Saudi Arabia.We are grateful to Prof.Weibo Song(OUC,China)and Dr.Brandon Kwee Boon Seah(Max Planck Institute for Biology,Tübingen,Germany)for their suggestions while drafting the manuscript.