Читать книгу Parasitology - Alan Gunn - Страница 43

The kingdom Protista is a loose assemblage of organisms linked together by their shared characteristic of a membrane bound nucleus – which therefore makes them eukaryotes – and their lack of the organizational features found in the kingdoms Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia. Although they are for the most part single‐celled, some are colonial. The lack of unifying morphological and molecular features indicates that the kingdom is polyphyletic – that is, it is composed of individuals that arose from various different ancestors. Consequently, there are frequent calls for its division into several separate kingdoms or clades to reflect these differences.