ИСТИНА

Protists are the most heterogeneous at cellular and molecular levels group of eukaryotes. They play an important role in ecosystem functioning as a part of microbial communities and have a high potential for human practical activity as a resource for the development of biotechnologies. Inventory, systematization, and integration of the data on the diversity of protists are of primary importance. We have made the technical platform and started the development of web-system, which allows integrating the information on morphological, molecular, and ecological features of different protist species. The content of the web-system will include morphological descriptions and differential diagnoses of the species, photos of living cells and whole mounts, electron-microscopic illustrations of coverings and cell ultrastructure, movies of live cells, drawings, sequences of phylogenetically important genes, molecular phylogenetic trees, databases on geographic and biotopic distribution of the species, protistological literature. Now we focus on four groups of free-living protists: heterotrophic flagellates, testate amoebae, ciliates, centroheliozoans. The work on interactive illustrative keys for some taxonomic groups was started. Registered on the website users can upload and edit content, create personal profiles, and topics on the forum. We invite all protistologists to join our team. The integrated web-system is available for observing on the Internet at http://protist.ru/.