Amoeba is a genus of single-celled amoeboids in the family Amoebidae. The type species of the genus is Amoeba proteus, a common freshwater organism, widely studied in classrooms and laboratories.
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👉 Amoeba (genus) in the context of Amoebozoa
Amoebozoa is a major taxonomic group containing about 2,400 described species of amoeboid protists, often possessing blunt, fingerlike, lobose pseudopods and tubular mitochondrial cristae. In traditional classification schemes, Amoebozoa is usually ranked as a phylum within either the kingdom Protista or the kingdom Protozoa. In the classification favored by the International Society of Protistologists, it is retained as an unranked "supergroup" within Eukaryota. Molecular genetic analysis supports Amoebozoa as a monophyletic clade. Modern studies of eukaryotic phylogenetic trees identify it as the sister group to Opisthokonta, another major clade which contains both fungi and animals as well as several other clades comprising some 300 species of unicellular eukaryotes. Amoebozoa and Opisthokonta are sometimes grouped together in a high-level taxon, named Amorphea.Amoebozoa includes many of the best-known amoeboid organisms, such as Chaos, Entamoeba, Pelomyxa and the genus Amoeba itself. Species of Amoebozoa may be either shelled (testate) or naked, and cells may possess flagella. Free-living species are common in both salt and freshwater as well as soil, moss and leaf litter. Some live as parasites or symbionts of other organisms, and some are known to cause disease in humans and other organisms.
While the majority of amoebozoan species are unicellular, the group also includes several clades of slime molds, which have a macroscopic, multicellular stage of life during which individual amoeboid cells remain together after multiple cell division to form a macroscopic plasmodium or, in cellular slime molds, aggregate to form one.
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Amoeba (genus) in the context of Chaos carolinense
Chaos is a genus of single-celled amoeboid organisms in the family Amoebidae. The largest and most-known species, the so-called "giant amoeba" (Chaos carolinense), can reach lengths up to 5 mm, although most specimens fall between 1 and 3 mm.
Members of this genus closely resemble those of the genus Amoeba and share the same general morphology, producing numerous cylindrical pseudopods, each of which is rounded at the tip. However, while Amoeba have a single nucleus, Chaos can have as many as a thousand. Because of this attribute, C. carolinense was once placed in the genus Pelomyxa alongside the giant multinucleate amoeba Pelomyxa palustris. Recently, molecular phylogenetic studies of this species have confirmed the view of some earlier researchers that it is more closely related to Amoeba than to Pelomyxa. The species is now placed in the independent genus Chaos, a sister group to Amoeba.