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

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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).

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Acknowledgments

We thank Professor Gilles Bourdier for having invited us (some years ago) to collaborate on his research project. We thank Diane Stoecker, Evelyn and Barry Sherr for having provided useful information and many answers. We are grateful to Dr. Keith Joblin (AgResearch Ltd., Hamilton N.Z.) for his help in improving the text from a linguistic perspective.

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    Christian Desvilettes & Alexandre Bec

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    Desvilettes, C., Bec, A. (2009). Formation and Transfer of Fatty Acids in Aquatic Microbial Food Webs: Role of Heterotrophic Protists. In: Kainz, M., Brett, M., Arts, M. (eds) Lipids in Aquatic Ecosystems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89366-2_2

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