Where have all the protists gone?
Given the obvious overlap in organismal sizes, ecological roles, theoretical concepts and technological approaches common to all microbes, why have many investigators lost sight of the protists within microbial ecology (and is not this last point the needed proof that they are indeed microbes!)? We suggest that a major contributing factor has been limitations in sequencing and computational technologies for dealing with protistan genome size and complexity. More than any other factor, this issue has significantly retarded the entrainment of these species into the mainstream of the present microbial revolution. Technologies are advancing at a head-spinning rate, and the ‘-omics era’ is an exciting period for anyone associated with the study of microorganisms. New genomic techniques, presently applied primarily to bacteria and archaea, are revolutionizing our understanding of the evolution and phylogeny of these species and are providing powerful new tools to investigate their ecologies
