1.2 describe the common features shared by organisms within the following main groups: plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, protoctists and viruses, and for each group describe examples and their features

Main Groups of Organisms 

• Plants
• Animals 
• Fungi
• Bacteria 
• Protoctists
• Viruses 

Plants

• Multicellular organisms
• Cells contain chloroplast and are able to carry out photosynthesis
• Cells have cellulose cell walls
• They store carbohydrates as starch or sucrose

Examples include flowering plants, such as cereal (e.g. maize) and a herbaceous legume (e.g. peas or beans)

Animals

• Multicellular organisms
• Cells do not contain chloroplast and are not able to carry out photosynthesis
• Cells do not contain cell walls
• They usually have a nervous coordination and are able to move from one place to another 
• They often store carbohydrates as glycogen 

Examples include mammals (e.g. humans) and insects (e.g. mosquito) 

Fungi

• Usually organised into a mycelium made from thread-like structures called hyphae, which contain many nuclei (multicellular)
• Some examples are single-celled
• They are saprophytic and feed by excreting digestive enzymes onto food and absorbing the digested products (saprotrophic nutrition)
• Their cells have walls made of chitin (a protein)
• They store carbohydrates as glycogen

Examples include Mucor (hyphal/multicellular) and yeast (single cell)

Bacteria

• These are microscopic single-celled organisms
• They don’t have a nucleus but contain a circular chromosome of DNA (a bacterial chromosome)
• Some bacteria can carry out photosynthesis, but most are saprophytes and feed of dead organisms
• They have a cell wall, cell membrane, cytoplasm and plasmids

Examples include Lactobacillus bulgaricus (a rod-shaped bacterium used in the production of yoghurt from milk) and Pneumococcus (a spherical bacterium that causes Pneumonia) 

Protoctisis

• Everything else that doesn’t fit in any of the other kingdoms
• They can be single-celled and multicellular organisms

Some like Amoeba that live in pond water, have animal characteristics
Some like Chlorella have chloroplast and have plant characteristics
A pathogenic example is Plasmodium, responsible for causing malaria 

Viruses

• Not living organisms 
• The small particles, smaller than bacteria, not made out of cells
• They are parasitic and can only reproduce inside living cells (host cells)
• They can infect every type of  living organisms
• They do not have a cellular structure but have a protein coat and contain one type of nucleic acid,  either DNA or RNA

Examples include the tobacco mosaic virus, the influenza virus (causes “flu”) and the HIV virus (causes AIDS)