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One of the most jaw dropping bits of serendipity in molecular biology (enabled by the free and open sharing of data) was the discovery in the early 90s that the malaria parasite - Plasmodium - is actually an ancient algae. Yup - you read that right.
Sometime ago Plasmodium and its cousins decided to pack in its freeliving autroph/mixtroph life style (mixotroph - a bit of photosynthesis, a bit of feeding) and become an outright parasite, and these nasties have parasitised everything from humans to snails
Here (elifesciences.org/articles/49662) Jan Janouškovec wrestles more of the apocomplexan phylogeny to the ground, and in Figure 1 it is just ... hideously complex. Plasmodium is at the top.
This clade has evolved parasitism multiple times; lost plastids multiple times; kept plastids in weird ways and just generally is way out there. Plus - it harbours one of humanities biggest killers (plasmodium).
All credit to Jan - just reading about this makes my eyes / brain smart as the original taxonomy is created before the molecular phylogenetic tree so ones just has a host of terms of define/redefine/junk whatever.
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