Trichodina is a genus of ciliate alveolates that is ectocommensal or parasitic on aquatic animals, particularly fish. They are characterised by the presence of a ring of interlocking cytoskeletal denticles, which provide support for the cell and allow for adhesion to surfaces including fish tissue.
Trichodina is a genus of ciliate alveolates that is ectocommensal or parasitic on aquatic animals, particularly fish. They are characterised by the presence of a ring of interlocking cytoskeletal denticles, which provide support for the cell and allow for adhesion to surfaces including fish tissue.
== Taxonomy == Trichodinids are members of the peritrichous ciliates, a paraphyletic group within the Oligohymenophorea. Specifically, they are mobiline peritrichs because they are capable of locomotion, as opposed to sessiline peritrichs such as Vorticella and Epistylis, which adhere to the substrate via a stalk or lorica. There are over 150 species in the genus Trichodina. Trichodinella, Tripartiella, Hemitrichodina, Paratrichodina and Vauchomia are similar genera.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).