They likely evolved before land plants did, and helped to pump oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere along with their ancestors, the cyanobacteria. Throughout history, algae have been important photosynthesizers.

Instead, these single-celled photosynthetic organisms are thought to be relatives of the lineage that led to land plants.

Microscopic algae were once thought to be plants, but recent studies have shown that algae don’t fit into the plant family.

Slime mold intercellular cooperation is so impressive that scientists have been using slime molds to study intelligence and problem-solving! Algae They also include the fantastically weird class of slime molds – single-celled organisms that are capable of cooperation so impressive that, during one stage of their life cycle, many slime mold cells gather together and operate like a single organism. These include pathogenic molds that infect plants and have caused devastating crop failures such as the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s. Molds are microorganisms that share some properties of fungi, but are not true fungi. The carbon dioxide can make our breads and cakes fluffy and the alcohol can build up to intoxicating levels, if yeasts are bottled with a high concentration of sugar. Yeast feeds on sugars found in foods and converts it into carbon dioxide – and, yes, ethyl alcohol. Yeast is the fungus that is responsible for making baked goods rise and for producing alcoholic beverages such as beer, wine, and liquor. Though some microscopic fungi can infect humans just like bacteria or protozoa, there’s one microscopic fungus that most humans like a lot: yeast! Several dangerous human diseases including malaria, toxoplasmosis, giardia, African “sleeping sickness,” and Chagas disease are caused by protozoa. Like bacteria and archaea, they are single-celled but their cells resemble those of animals and plants more than those of bacteria or archaea. Protozoa are a diverse group of unicellular eukaryotic organisms. Loricifera (microscopic animals that live in ocean sediments).Arthropods (dust mites, spider mites, microscopic crustaceans).

What is micro biology