Plagiopylida Explained

The plagiopylids are a small order of ciliates, including a few forms common in anaerobic habitats.

The body cilia are dense, and arise from monokinetids with an entirely unique ultrastructure; one or two rows of dikinetids run into the oral cavity, which takes the form of a groove, with a deep tube lined by oral cilia leading to the mouth. The order was introduced by Eugen Small and Denis Lynn in 1985, who treated it as a subclass of Oligohymenophorea. Since then they tend to be treated as an independent class, possibly affiliated with the Colpodea. Class Plagiopylea is divided into two clades:^[1] one contains members of the order Plagiopylida (like Plagiopyla frontata and Trimyema compressum) and the second clade contains plagiopylean ciliate associated with denitrifying obligate endosymbiont Candidatus Azoamicus ciliaticola.^[2]

Further reading

• Xu Y, Shao C, Miao M, Song W . Redescription of Parasonderia vestita (Kahl, 1928) comb. nov. (Ciliophora, Plagiopylida), with notes on its phylogeny based on SSU rRNA gene . European Journal of Protistology . 49 . 1 . 106–13 . January 2013 . 22771178 . 10.1016/j.ejop.2012.03.001 .
• Modeo L, Fokin SI, Boscaro V, Andreoli I, Ferrantini F, Rosati G, Verni F, Petroni G . 6 . Morphology, ultrastructure, and molecular phylogeny of the ciliate Sonderia vorax with insights into the systematics of order Plagiopylida . BMC Microbiology . 13 . 40 . 40 . February 2013 . 23418998 . 3626617 . 10.1186/1471-2180-13-40 . free .

Notes and References

1. Boscaro V, Santoferrara LF, Zhang Q, Gentekaki E, Syberg-Olsen MJ, Del Campo J, Keeling PJ . EukRef-Ciliophora: a manually curated, phylogeny-based database of small subunit rRNA gene sequences of ciliates . Environmental Microbiology . 20 . 6 . 2218–2230 . June 2018 . 29727060 . 10.1111/1462-2920.14264 . 19135660 .
2. Graf JS, Schorn S, Kitzinger K, Ahmerkamp S, Woehle C, Huettel B, Schubert CJ, Kuypers MM, Milucka J . 6 . Anaerobic endosymbiont generates energy for ciliate host by denitrification . Nature . 591 . 7850 . 445–450 . March 2021 . 33658719 . 7969357 . 10.1038/s41586-021-03297-6 . 2021Natur.591..445G .