telonemia telonemia telonemia is a phylum of microscopic eukaryote, single-celled organisms. they were formerly classified within kingdom chromista. they are suggested to have evolutionary significance in being a possible transitional form between ecologically important heterotrophic and photosynthetic species among chromalveolates. telonemia telonema rivulare by interference contrast micrography scientific classification domain: eukaryota clade: diaphoretickes clade: tsar phylum: telonemia genera lateronema telonema t. rivulare by electron micrography although they have been studied in primarily marine environments, they have also been found in freshwater. shalchian-tabrizi et al say that 18s rdna sequences in the phylum formed two major groups, group 1 and 2, including t. subtilis and t. antarcticum respectively, and that these were further sub-divided into several statistically supported clades of sequences with restricted geographic distribution. species of telonemia are heterotrophic predators, feeding on a wide range of bacteria and pico- to nano-sized phytoplankton. chloroplasts have not been observed in any of the investigated species. by using specific pcr primers, they revealed a much larger diversity of telonemia from environmental samples than previously uncovered by eukaryote-wide primers. they are globally distributed in marine waters and are frequently encountered in environmental clone libraries. the evolutionary origin of telonemia was inferred from phylogenetic reconstruction of single- and concatenated sequences obtained from both cultured strains and environmental clones. a 2009 paper places them in the sar supergroup. phylogenomic analyses of 127 genes in 2009 placed telonemia with centroheliozoa in a group containing the cryptomonads and haptophytes. pawlowski identified it in 2013 as a micro-kingdom. in 2019 a phylogenetic analysis placed them as sister to the sar group. species only two species had been described formally by 2019; dna sequences collected from seawater suggested there were many more species not yet described. in 2022, tikhonenkov and colleagues described 5 new species and a new genus. class telonemea cavalier-smith 1993 order telonemida cavalier-smith 1993 family telonemidae cavalier-smith 1993 genera lateronema cavalier-smith 2015 species lateronema antarctica (thomsen 2005) cavalier-smith 2015 genera telonema griessmann 1913 species telonema subtile griessmann 1913 history the genus telonema was described in 1913 by griessmann.