Species Identification Through Sequencing

Ciliates with nuclear dualism are reported to be a highly divergent unicellular eukaryotes. They play very vital roles in regulation of microbial food webs as they feed on bacteria, protists, and even on microscopic animals. Their tiny size, fast-moving nature, and subtle differences in morphology pose a problem for their accurate identification and taxonomic grouping. Hence, molecular technique proved to be an efficient alternative to identify and resolve the ciliate diversity at species level. Many marker genes are reported to reveal the ciliate identity and construct accurate phylogeny. Out of which, the marker gene ITS1-5.8S-ITS2 is found to be most suitable and preferable by researchers to establish the molecular identity of ciliates, while primers 384F and 1147R have proved effective for uncovering the broad range of ciliate diversity. Here we have listed the various ciliates’ specific primer sets/pairs to amplify the selected marker genes as well as documented the procedure for the PCR amplification and sequencing followed by bioinformatic analysis to construct the phylogeny tree.