{"doi":"10.3389/fcimb.2021.738994","title":"Editorial: Celebrating Microbial Diversity: The Many Cell Cycles of Eukaryotic Microbes","abstract":"The cell cycle is a fundamental process in biology: all living organisms must be able to generate new cells. The ways in which they do this are surprisingly variable. Cell cycle machinery has been studied in exquisite detail over several decades in model organisms such as bacteria, unicellular yeasts and mammalian cells, giving rise to the concept of 'The cell cycle'a binary division process that is stereotypic and highly conserved. However, as horizons have expanded beyond these model organisms, it has become clear that binary division is not the only mode of replication. In particular, early-diverging eukaryotic microbes often divide by 'unconventional' means, such as schizogony in malaria parasites and endodyogeny in Toxoplasma parasites. In fact, microbial cell cycles are so diverse as to raise the question: 'Does a 'conventional' cell cycle actually exist?' Nonbinary-fission cycles are common among protozoan parasites, including most of the Apicomplexa, a phylum including medically important parasites such as Plasmodium, Babesia, Toxoplasma and Cryptosporidium","journal":"Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology","year":2021,"id":221299,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9571,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2021-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":414201,"name":"Sabrina Absalon","orcid":"0000-0003-2468-8156","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":816944,"name":"Mathieu Brochet","orcid":"0000-0003-3911-5537","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":382627,"name":"Ziyin Li","orcid":"0000-0002-3960-9716","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":401622,"name":"Elena S. Suvorova","orcid":"0000-0003-4482-8144","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":821311,"name":"Catherine J. Merrick","orcid":"0000-0001-7583-2176","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":6,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:53:55.215284Z","pmid":"34395317","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}