Protists on the spot: opening the field of view on protistology
Fiona Henriquez, Sonja Rueckert and Anastasios Tsaousis
Discovery of protists When it comes to the natural world, most knowledge, including that of the general public, is focused on animals and plants. Until a few centuries ago, one of the major reasons for this was the lack of technology to make micro-organisms visible. This changed when Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (1632– 1723), a trained linen draper and haberdasher, developed a single-lensed microscope out of his own interest to study what lay beyond his eyes. Leeuwenhoek spent a lot of time making lenses to find the perfect one. The range of magnification of these lenses was between 50 and 300 times. Driven by his curiosity, he used these simple microscopes to describe the little critters he discovered in environments that ranged from rainwater to the human intestine, as animalcules. Even though he was not a trained scientist, his thorough observations enabled him to make some fundamental discoveries, which he sent in the form of letters to the Royal Society. In the beginning, his discoveries were often disputed due to his background, but this changed over his lifetime, and his work (~375 contributions) was mostly published in Philosophical Transactions . He has been coined as the father of microbiology as his microscopes enabled him to describe bacteria and protists for the first time ever. He was motivated to answer essential questions, some of which we are still trying to answer today: why is there such a diversity (morphology/ behaviour) of these organisms and how did it evolve? How can they be distinguished and classified? Why is protistology important? Protists or protozoa are a large group of single-celled eukaryotes that have been identified across the eukaryotic tree of life. They are not a monophyletic group, and some species are close relatives of plants, animals and fungi.
68 Microbiology Today October 2022 | microbiologysociety.org
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