Table II.

Summary of old and new methods used to study mixoplankton. Currently available methods for detecting and assessing phago-mixotrophy in culture and in situ. For each method we indicate whether it can be used to identify a mixoplankton cell, be used to taxonomically classify mixoplankton, estimate mixoplankton cell abundance, estimate the ingestion rate of mixoplankton, estimate the photosynthetic rate of mixoplankton, and whether it has ever been used to study in situ mixoplankton

Method	Is a cell mixoplankton?	Taxonomic identification	Abundance	Ingestion/Grazing rate	Photosynthetic rate	Has been used for in situ detection
Fluorescent particle consumption1,2,3,5,7,8,9	Yes	Some	Yes	Yes	No	Yes
Food vacuole staining4,5,6,7,8	Yes	Some	Yes	No	No	Yes
FISH probing10,11,12,13	Yesa	Yesa	Yesa	No	No	Yesa
Stable isotope probing14,15,16	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Yes
BrdU labeling17	Yes	Yes	Yesb	No	No	Yes
In situ transcriptomics18	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	Yes
PAM fluorometry19	Yes	No	Yes	No	PE	Rare
Radioisotope probing20,21,22	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Imaging cytometry23	Yesa	Yesa	Yes	No	No	Yesa

PE = photosynthetic efficiency

^aKnown mixoplankton only

^bBy OTU (operational taxonomic unit)

References cited: ¹Cucci et al., (1989), ²Havskum and Reimann, (1996), ³Unrein et al. (2007), ⁴Li et al., (2016), ⁵Wilken et al. (2019), ⁶Rose et al. (2004), ⁷Anderson et al. (2017), ⁸Beisner et al. (2019), ⁹Bock et al. (2021), ¹⁰Unrein et al., (2014), ¹¹Hartmann et al., (2013), ¹²Grujcic et al., (2018), ¹³Massana et al. (2009), ¹⁴Terrado et al. (2017), ¹⁵Orsi et al. (2018), ¹⁶Carpenter et al. (2018), ¹⁷Gast et al. (2018), ¹⁸Lambert et al. (2022), ¹⁹Lin and Glibert (2019), ²⁰Adolf et al. (2006), ²¹Zubkov and Tarran (2008), ²²Duhamel et al. (2019), ²³Brownlee et al. (2016)