Product Name: Euglena Powder
Plant source: Euglena
Appearance: green powder

Brief Introduction

Euglena is a genus of unicellular flagellate protists. It is the best known and most widely studied member of the phylumEuglenophyta, a diverse group containing some 44 genera and at least 800 species.[1] Species of Euglena are found in fresh and salt waters. They are often abundant in quiet, inland waters, where they may bloom in numbers sufficient to color the surface of ponds and ditches green (E. viridis) or red (E. sanguinea).


Main Function:
When feeding as a heterotroph, the Euglena surrounds a particle of food and consumes it by phagocytosis. When there is sufficient sunlight for it to feed by phototrophy, it uses chloroplasts containing the pigments Chlorophyll a and Chlorophyll b to produce sugars by photosynthesis.[6] Euglena's chloroplasts are surrounded by three membranes, while those of plants and the green algae (among which earlier taxonomists often placed Euglena) have only two membranes. This fact has been taken as morphological evidence that Euglena's chloroplasts evolved from a eukaryotic green alga.[7] Thus, the intriguing similarities between Euglena and the plants would have arisen not because of kinship but because of a secondary endosymbiosis. Molecular phylogenetic analysis has lent support to this hypothesis, and it is now generally accepted.