What factors do you believe contributed to Protistan diversity?

What factors do you believe contributed to Protistan diversity? Support your response with appropriate evidence. Answer tgis question with 200 word and Respond to 2 other students, analyzing their initial post with 100 words each.
Replying to Other Students’ Posts
You must also read and reply to other students, as indicated in each discussion Submission Instructions. Your replies should offer new substantiated ideas or thoughtful questions.
I encourage friendly debate and disagreement but ask that it be courteous and respectful. Do not be afraid to speak your mind, but remember that yours is only one opinion.
Student 1

Allysa Almario
Mar 6, 2022 at 10:25 PM
Protists are eukaryotes and are usually unicellular. However, not all protists are single-celled and can share more history with different organisms rather than other protists. I believe a factor that contributed to Protistan diversity is endosymbiosis. Endosymbiosis is a process in which an organism lives in an another organism’s cells. According to Urry et al. (2020) some organelles originated from this process when analyzing organisms’ DNA. Through this process, protists would be able to gain different characteristics by taking in a bacterium. Another factor is the change in environment. An environment change could be a difference in soil. A study was conducted and showed that pH levels as well as the consistency of the soil determined the variation in protists (Ceja-Navarro et al., 2021). These components caused there to be more diversity in bulk soil compared to the rhizosphere.
References:
Ceja-Navarro, J. A., Wang, Y., Ning, D., Arellano, A., Ramanculova, L., Yuan, M. M., Byer, A., Craven, K. D., Saha, M. C., Brodie, E. L., Pett-Ridge, J., & Firestone, M. K. (2021, April 28). Protist diversity and community complexity in the rhizosphere of switchgrass are dynamic as plants develop – microbiome. BioMed Central. Retrieved March 6, 2022, from https://microbiomejournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40168-021-01042-9
Urry, L. A., Cain, M. L., Minorsky, P. V., Wasserman, S. A., & Orr, R. B. (2020). Campbell Biology. PEARSON.

Student 2

Maribel Mejia
Mar 8, 2022 at 7:56 AM
The protist kingdom is a classification of organisms known as eukaryotes formed mainly by unicellular and microscopic microorganisms that have a nucleus and organelles and by some multicellular organisms that do not fit into any group. I think that the conditions favorable to the diversity of protistan are:
Eukaryotic cells, thanks to endosymbiosis, are powerful and efficient. That power and efficiency gave them the potential to evolve new features: multicellularity, cell specialization, and large size. They were the key to the spectacular diversity of animals, plants and fungi that inhabit the world today.
Another factor that can contribute to the diversity of protists include pH, water content, and soil type. Protists, microscopic eukaryotes, are very diverse in the soil, where they play different ecological roles as primary producers, saprotrophs, predators or parasites and, therefore, have a key role in the functioning of the ecosystem.
During the fieldwork, the researchers extracted soil DNA from these nearly two hundred sites across a wide range of elevations and Alpine grasslands, evaluating by modeling the diversity patterns of three functional groups: parasites, phagotrophs and phototrophs, depending on the climatic topography (topography, south slope, slope and mean summer temperature) and edaphic topography (soil temperature, relative humidity, pH).
References:
Zou, S., Zhang, Q., Zhang, X., Dupuy, C., & Gong, J. (1AD, January 1). Environmental factors and pollution stresses select bacterial populations in association with protists. Frontiers. Retrieved March 8, 2022, from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmars.2020.00659/full
Urry, L. A., Cain, M. L., Minorsky, P. V., Wasserman, S. A., & Orr, R. B. (2020). Campbell Biology. PEARSON.

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