Cutosea () is a small group of marine amoeboid protists proposed in 2016. It is a monotypic class of Amoebozoa containing the order Squamocutida (). Cutosean organisms are characterized by a cell coat of microscales separated from the cell membrane. Four genera, Armaparvus, Idionectes, Sapocribrum and Squamamoeba, belong to this group, distributed in three families.
Cutosea () is a small group of marine amoeboid protists proposed in 2016. It is a monotypic class of Amoebozoa containing the order Squamocutida (). Cutosean organisms are characterized by a cell coat of microscales separated from the cell membrane. Four genera, Armaparvus, Idionectes, Sapocribrum and Squamamoeba, belong to this group, distributed in three families.
== Characteristics == The cells of cutosean amoebae are surrounded by a continuous thin, somewhat flexible envelope, unique in structure because it is not attached to the cytoplasmic membrane. Below this envelope, they present oval microscales surrounded by a dense matrix. The small scales are not visible under a light microscope. The envelope is penetrated by one or many small pores, which allow subpseudopodia to occasionally protrude from the cell membrane, for a very slow locomotion. Locomoting cells are flattened, oval or round in shape. All of their cells lack cilia or centrosomes, except for the uniciliate swarm cells of the amoeboflagellate Idionectes.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).