Openly available illustrations as tools to describe eukaryotic microbial diversity.

Microbial life maintains nearly all the support systems that keep the Earth habitable, yet the diversity of this vast microbial world is greatly understudied, misrepresented, and misunderstood. Even what we do know is difficult to communicate broadly because an intuitive grasp of what these tiny organisms are like is abstract, and we lack tools that would help to describe them. In this Essay, we present a series of openly available technical diagrams that illustrate the diverse range of complex body plans of microbial eukaryotes (or "protists"), as well as an illustrated tree to show the vast diversity they encompass and how they are related to the more familiar macroscopic animals, fungi, and plants. These sorts of tools are desperately needed for teaching and communication about the microbial world, which is a pressingly important problem where much improvement is needed.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
(Copyright: © 2023 Keeling, Eglit. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)