Rozella andRozellopsis: Naked endoparasitic fungi which dress-up as their hosts

The Environmental Clade LKM11 and Rozella Form the Deepest Branching Clade of Fungi

“…Each Rozella morphospecies seems to be specific to a restricted number of hosts (Held 1981). Their life cycle comprises a uniflagellate motile stage that allows them to disperse in search of a new host, and a trophic wall-less intracellular stage, which develops inside a host cell (Held 1981). At this point, the parasite is amoeboid and phagocytoses the organelles of the host (Powell 1984); no filamentous growth (formation of hyphae/rhizoid) has been observed in this genus.…”

“…However, the fact that Rozella coleochaetis has been found in the filamentous green alga Coleochaete (Sparrow et al 1965) suggests additional potential hosts. Each Rozella morphospecies seems to be specific to a restricted number of hosts (Held 1981). Their life cycle comprises a uniflagellate motile stage that allows them to disperse in search of a new host, and a trophic wall-less intracellular stage, which develops inside a host cell (Held 1981).…”

Early evolution of eukaryote feeding modes, cell structural diversity, and classification of the protozoan phyla Loukozoa, Sulcozoa, and Choanozoa

“…Aphelidida, originally treated as a separate class of algal parasites (Gromov 2000) were placed in Ichthyosporea by Shalchian-Tabrizi et al (2008). I now consider Aphelidida more likely to be related to Rozella, a posteriorly uniciliate naked intracellular parasite of fungi (Held 1980(Held , 1981Powell 1984) recently shown to be sister to the kingdom Fungi (Jones et al 2011;Lara et al 2010). Rozella was originally regarded as a chytridiomycete fungus, but as it is phagotrophic and naked it is better to treat it as a choanozoan protozoan, especially as it does not group specifically with Chytridiomycotina or within the fungal clade.…”

Morphology, phylogeny, and ecology of the aphelids (Aphelidea, Opisthokonta) and proposal for the new superphylum Opisthosporidia

“…The host range for R. allomycis has been tested in the laboratory and appears to be very narrow, with only a few genotypes of Allomyces being susceptible to infection (Held, 1981). Gromov and Mamkaeva (1968) measured the susceptibility of 226 different strains of green and yellow-green algae to infection by four isolates of Amoeboaphelidium (x-1 through x-4 CALU).…”