Exploring the landscape of symbiotic diversity and distribution in unicellular ciliated protists. metagenome

Eukaryotic-bacterial symbiotic systems play important roles in various physiologic, developmental and evolutionary processes. Our current understanding of these systems, however, is primarily focused on multicellular eukaryotes without adequate consideration of diverse unicellular protozoan ciliates. To address this gap, we collected 246 ciliate samples representing the full breadth of the Ciliophora phylum and sequenced the genomes of bacteria associated with these unicellular organisms using single-cell genome sequencing.