How can protists be distinguished from the higher kingdoms of plants,animals, and fungi?

How can protists be distinguished from the higher kingdoms of plants,animals, and fungi?How can protists be distinguished from the higher kingdoms of plants,animals, and fungi?
The Kingdom Protista is a diverse group so it can be quite difficult to identify them. They're eukaryotes, so it can be rather straightforward to differentiate them from prokaryotes, but many of them are photosynthetic so it's easy to confuse them with some single-celled plants.





Protists are either ';unicellular, or they are multicellular without specialized tissues.';[1] Thus they should be fairly straight-forward to differentiate from multicellular plants and animals.





Slime molds and water molds can superficially look like fungus. Slime molds do not have hyphae, though you may need to use a microscope to check that. Water molds' ';cell walls are composed of cellulose rather than chitin and generally do not have septations. Also, in the vegetative state they have diploid nuclei, whereas fungi have haploid nuclei.';[4]





For the photosynthetic protists, you probably just need to make sure it's not green algae to figure out it's a protist. I'm unsure of the exact differences between green algae and similar protists so I can't help ya there.