Talk:Actinophryid

Connection to Orch-OR

According to Penrose/Hameroff's controversial Orch-OR theory of quantum consciousness the Actinosphaerium, or Cambrian organisms similar to it, "may be among the first organisms to experience primitive consciousness". Maybe worth mentioning?

See this page, "Figure 11".

213.100.20.29 11:04, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

January 1st 2018 edits

I've decided to go through and revamp this page, so I'm keeping a general list of my edits here as well as thoughts and reasons for changes.

Title paragraph: Was originally stolen verbatim from "Pictured Glossary in Biology". Wiped text and rewrote the relevant information and added source. Added additional references to other sources to provide additional context. I'm not going to tag the last sentence as "citation needed" because I've seen these contractile vacuoles in real life when working with these organisms, but it may need a source in the future.

Second paragraph: It looks like all this information was previously outdated. I've added sources to the first two genera and removed unhelpful internal links to the "orders of magnitude" page, replaced by a single link to the micrometer page.

I'm not sure how to best express the controversy over some of the new genera that I added. The first review article of the heliozoa was done by Mikrjukov & Patterson in 2001, which preserved Actinophrys and Actinosphaerium by collapsing Echinosphaerium and Camptonema into Actinosphaerium and denying several species discovered by the Suzaki group (akamae and ikachiensis). They also move the Ciliophrys to the pedinellids based on the discovery of Ciliophrys azurina. However, essentially all of these decisions were reversed by Cavalier-Smith and Scoble in 2013. Cavalier-Smith & Scoble move all of the actinophryids to the Raphidomonadea class, support the existence of several different species of Actinosphaerium, rename Ciliophrys azurina to Heliorapha azurina and place it within a new genus, the Heliorapha.

I've stuck mainly with Cavalier-Smith & Scoble when editing because their paper is newer by 10 years and takes advantage of many new genomic analyses as well as the structural elements that Mikrjukov & Patterson in used. I've added Camptonema and Ciliophrys to the taxobox based on this, although I've tagged Camptonema as debated. However, I'm less happy with the introduction of Heliorapha because it doesn't appear to be well documented elsewhere (i.e. TOL). Wikispecies includes the Cavalier-Smith & Scoble taxonomy as the most recent version for both Actinophryida and Raphidophyceae. The slightly sketchy Taxonomicon uses the Cavalier-Smith designations as well. Thoughts and comments on this are welcome.

Third paragraph is now broken up into several sections and greatly expanded upon, with references to proper material. I've split it into separate sections for Axopodia, Reproduction, and a hopeful future section on Encystment.

Section on Cyst function and formation is done, as well as the other two sections. Sources have been added and prior text has been moved around to make more sense.

Final paragraph: I've moved this underneath the Taxonomy section because it seems to fit better there, but the debate in question will need to be resolved at one point or another because the actinophryids are currently claimed by both the Raphidophytes and the Axodines. Daemyth (talk) 23:39, 1 January 2018 (UTC)