Formation and Transfer of Fatty Acids in Aquatic Microbial Food Webs: Role of Heterotrophic Protists

Abstract

The term protist was first coined by Haeckel in 1866 for diverse microorganisms including bacteria (Haeckel 1866). However, in 1925 in a paper on an amoeboid parasite of Daphnia, Chatton (1925) highlighted for the first time the fundamental difference between prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms and the term protist to be now used to describe unicellular eukaryotes, which do not differentiate into tissues (see Adl et al. 2005)