Together with Radiolaria, Heliozoa is a diverse group of protists characterized
by radiating cellular projections called axopodia. Both groups are polyphyletic,
with almost all main radiolarian and heliozoan lineages having been placed in
different parts of the eukaryotic tree. One notable exception is the centrohelid
heliozoans, the last large axopodia-bearing assemblage that remains of
enigmatic evolutionary origin. Centrohelids are predatory protists very
common in freshwater and soil habitats, and can also occur widely in marine
environments. Phylogenies based on the 18S rRNA have notoriously failed to
infer the evolutionary relationships of centrohelids to other eukaryotes, even the
use of multiple protein-coding genes was unsuccessful at pinpointing a robust
origin. Thus far, however, only one small transcriptome dataset for centrohelids
is available, leading to 2 main shortcomings in the phylogenetic reconstructions:
1) the centrohelid diversity was not captured in earlier multigene-based
inferences; 2