How is digestion performed in protozoans?
Digestion in protozoans is intracellular digestion: organic material is internalized and degraded inside the cell. Protozoans get food by phagocytosis and then the food is digested when phagosomes fuse with lisosomes within the cell, forming digestive vacuoles. The digestive vacuoles give origin to residual bodies that are eliminated from the cell by exocytosis. In the paramecium the entrance of food into the cell and the excretion of digestive residuals occur at specialized regions of the plasma membrane, the cytostom and the cytopyge, respectively.
