The well-known ciliate, Mesodinium Stein, 1863, is of great importance to marine microbial food webs and is related to the ＂red tides＂. However, it is possibly one of the most confusing ciliate taxa in terms of its systematic position： either the morphological or the molecular data excluded it from all the other known assemblages or groups. In the current work, the sequences of small subunit ribosomal RNA （SSU rRNA） genes for all isolates available are analysed and an examination of the secondary structure patterns of related groups is carried out. The results indicate that （1） Mesodiniurn invariably represents a completely separated and isolated clade positioned between two subphyla of ciliates with very deep branching, which indicates that they should be a primitive or ancestral group for the subphylum Intramacronucleata; （2） the secondary structure of the SSU rRNA of Mesodinium species is unusual in that, while the secondary structure of V4 in Mesodinium sp. has the deletions common to all litostome ciliates, it has more extensive deletions in helix E23_8 and a longer helix E23_1; （3） combining the phylogenetic and morphological information, we suggest establishing Mesodiniea el. nov., including the order Mesodiniida Grain, 1994, belonging to the subphylum Intramacronucleata.
Ciliates are one of the oldest living eukaryotic unicellular organisms, widely distributed in the waters around the world. As a typical marine oligotrich ciliate, Strombidium sulcatum plays an important role in marine food webs and energy flow. Here we report the first deep se- quencing and analyses of RNA-Seq data from Strombidium sulcatum. We generated 42,640 unigenes with an N50 of 1,451 bp after de novo assembly and removing rRNA, mitochondrial and bacteria contaminants. We employed SPOCS to detect orthologs from S. sulcatum and 17 other ciliates, and then carried out the phyloge- nomic reconstruction using 127 single copy orthologs. In phylogenomic analyses, concatenated trees have similar topological structures with concordance tree on the class level. Together with phylogenetic networks analysis, it aroused more doubts about the placement of Protocruzia, Mesodinium and Myrionecta. While epi- plasmic proteins are known to be related to morphological characteristics, we found the potential relationship between gene expression of epiplasmic proteins and morphological characteristics. This work supports the use of high throughput approaches for phylogenomic analysis as well as correlation analysis between expression level of target genes and morphological characteristics.
The characteristics and infraciliature of a new euplotid ciliate, Euplotes qingdaoensis n. sp., discovered from the coastal waters of Jiaozhou Bay, northern China, were studied using live observation and silver impregnation. The new marine species is characterized by a slightly flattened body （90-110 um×70- 80 um, in vivo）, an adoral zone of 26-29 membranelles, 10 strong frontoventral and five transverse cirri, two caudal cirri, a single left marginal cirrus, seven dorsal kineties, a middle kinety with about 15 pairs of basal bodies, a silverline system of the double-eurystomus type, and a C-shaped macronucleus.
