Are We Overestimating Protistan Diversity in Nature?

Until recently it has been difficult to determine the full breadth of protistan species richness in natural communities using traditional morphology-based taxonomy, but high-throughput sequencing (HTS) of target genes has revealed unprecedented and unexpected species richness. Paradoxically, some recent estimates of the number of protistan operational taxonomic units (OTUs) are now approaching the total number of individual protists present in...