“Biodiversity, Taxonomy, Phylogeny, and biogeographical distribution of testate amoebae”

Research on the past twenty years has shown that the largest part of the eukaryotic tree is constituted by unicellular organisms, most of which are commonly designated as protists. Yet, the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationships between these organisms are still not well understood. One of the major problems affecting the phylogenies in many branches is undersampling, which biases seriously the phylogenies at the branch scale, and further the whole picture of the tree. Here, we aim to 1) Place of some unclassified testate amoeboid taxa in the eukaryotic tree. 2) Assemble molecular data based on gene analysis to contribute in the reconstruction of the Arcellinida tree. Our study of the Arcellinid diversity will lead us to shed light on some aspect of their evolution, i.e. 3) Evaluate the co-evolutionary relationships between testate amoebae and their endosymbionts.