
Filasterea is a basal Filozoan clade of single-celled ameboid eukaryotes that includes Ministeria and Capsaspora. It is a sister clade to the Choanozoa in which the choanoflagellates and animals appeared, originally proposed by Shalchian-Tabrizi et al. in 2008, based on a phylogenomic analysis with 78 genes. Filasterea was found to be the sister-group to the clade composed of Metazoa and Choanoflagellata within the Opisthokonta, a finding that has been further corroborated with additional, more taxon-rich, phylogenetic analyses.
Filasterea is a basal Filozoan clade of single-celled ameboid eukaryotes that includes Ministeria and Capsaspora. It is a sister clade to the Choanozoa in which the choanoflagellates and animals appeared, originally proposed by Shalchian-Tabrizi et al. in 2008, based on a phylogenomic analysis with 78 genes. Filasterea was found to be the sister-group to the clade composed of Metazoa and Choanoflagellata within the Opisthokonta, a finding that has been further corroborated with additional, more taxon-rich, phylogenetic analyses.
==Etymology== From Latin filum meaning "thread" and Greek aster meaning "star", it indicates the main morphological features shared by all their integrants: small, rounded amoeboids with a mononucleated cellular body, covered in long and radiating cell protrusions known as filopodia. These filopodia may be involved in substrate adhesion and capture of prey.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).