phyto-, phyt-, -phyte

A reference to organisms that inhabit small pools of water within or upon plants.

1. A place in which plants can be grown under controlled conditions; for example, a greenhouse.
2. A controllable artificial environment used for the study of plants under well-defined conditions.

A representative type of a plant.

A planktonic plant; a member of the phytoplankton: For her term paper in biology, Jane had to find and identify planktophytes, or those plankton that obtain energy by photosynthesis.

A meadow plant.

A river plant.

1. In botany, a plant which grows on another plant, but which does not, like a parasite, derive its nourishment from it.

Many orchids and also some ferns and many mosses, liverworts, lichens, and algæ are examples.

2. In zoology, a fungus parasitic on the skin and its appendages or on mucous surfaces of humans and other animals, causing disease; a dermatophyte.

1. A powerful type of microscope that uses a beam of protons, giving high resolution and sharp contrast.
2. An instrument that uses protons instead of electrons to form the image of minute or tiny objects for viewing.

A division of the plant kingdom, according to one system of classification, set up to include the bacteria, the blue-green algae, and the viruses.

Any unicellular plant, or plant forming only a plasmodium (mass of protoplasm), having reproduction only by fission (cell division), gemmation (process of budding), or cell division.

The protophytes (Protophyta) are by some botanists considered an independent branch or class of the vegetable kingdom, and made to include the lowest forms of both fungi and algae; such as, slime molds, Bacteria, the nostocs, etc.