Phylogeny and Classification of Novel Diversity in Sainouroidea (Cercozoa, Rhizaria) Sheds Light on a Highly Diverse and Divergent Clade

Sainouroidea is a molecularly diverse clade of cercozoan flagellates and amoebae in the eukaryotic supergroup Rhizaria. Previous 18S rDNA environmental sequencing of globally collected fecal and soil samples revealed great diversity and high sequence divergence in the Sainouroidea. However, a very limited amount of this diversity has been observed or described. The two described genera of amoebae in this clade are Guttulinopsis, which displays aggregative multicellularity, and Rosculus, which does not. Although the identity of Guttulinopsis is straightforward due to the multicellular fruiting bodies they form, the same is not true for Rosculus, and the actual identity of the original isolate is unclear. Here we isolated amoebae with morphologies like that of Guttulinopsis and Rosculus from many environments and analyzed them using 18S rDNA sequencing, light microscopy, and transmission electron microscopy. We define a molecular species concept for Sainouroidea that resulted in the description of 4 novel genera and 12 novel species of naked amoebae. Aggregative fruiting is restricted to the genus Guttulinopsis, but other than this there is little morphological variation amongst these taxa. Taken together, simple identification of these amoebae is problematic and potentially unresolvable without the 18S rDNA sequence.