Syndinium

Syndinium was first described by French biologist Édouard Chatton in 1910 as parasites of Paracalanus parvus, a marine copepod in the Mediterranean Sea. The first Syndinium species described was Syndinium turbo, which remains the most studied Syndinium species today. Due to there being 3 distinct zoospore morphologies for Synidium turbo, Chatton described it as 3 separate Syndinium species with the same host copepod species. This was corrected in 2005 when Skovgaard et al. discovered that the 3 zoospore morphologies of Syndinium turbo are genetically identical. Throughout the 20th Century researchers encountered Syndinium species in a range of copepod and radiolarian in marine habitats ranging from the Clyde Sea to Port Phillip Bay, Australia. In the 2000s, Syndinium is given renewed attention from protist researchers thanks to the maturation of metagenomics techniques such as environmental sequencing, bypassing the need to capture and culture. In 2001 rRNA amplification marine plankton samples led to the tentative establishment of group I and group II marine alveolates, two novel lineages that have not yet been cultivated in the laboratory. In 2005 researchers Skovgaard et al. performed phylogenetic analyses using small subunit ribosomal DNA and proposed that Syndiniophyceae, the class in which Syndinium belongs, is the group II marine alveolates. By 2008 it was confirmed that the group I and II marine alveolates belong to the order Syndiniales, which includes the genus Syndinium. == Habitat and ecology ==

Syndinium species have been recorded in a wide range of marine environments in both the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. As parasites, Syndinium infest planktonic copepods as well as radiolarians. As the life cycle of Syndinium species are not completely known, the ecological role of Syndinium in non-parasitic life stages are unclear. == Description ==

Life cycle The complete life cycle of Syndinium species has not been entirely elucidated. The most well studied parts of the Syndinium life cycle involves the parasitic stage. When infesting a planktonic host such as a copepod, Syndinium species develop into a plasmodial stage, successively consuming host organs until the entire volume of the exoskeleton is occupied by the plasmodium, killing the host in the process. Syndinium are notable for their mitotic nuclear division mechanisms involving nuclear membrane attached kinetochores and associated V-shaped chromosomes pushed away from each other by axially aligned microtubules. This method of nuclear division, while not altogether rare within dinoflagellates, were first studied in Syndinium. == List of species ==

Syndinium turbo ==References==