The Largest Bacterium Has Been Found. It's Eyelash-Length And Like Nothing We've Seen

A gigantic bacterium found in a mangrove swamp in the Caribbean is by far the largest ever found, and now scientists think they know how it grew to such an enormous size.

The Thiomargarita magnifica is 5000 times larger than the average bacteria and 50 times larger than all other giantbacteria. The Latin word for big is referred to in the name Magnifica.

Jean-Marie Volland, the lead author of the study, said it would be like a human meeting another human as tall as Everest.

One of the lush, green islands of Guadeloupe was the site of the discovery of the T. magnifica.

The graph shows the scale. Volland et al. are in science.

At the time of the discovery, Gros was looking forbacteria that use sulfur to produce energy.

He saw something strange when he put his sample into the petri dish. The threads that were visible to the naked eye were drifting above the leaves.

He thought they were strange when he saw them. I thought it was just something curious that needed to be attached to something in the water.

Several researchers have peered down microscopes to look at the prokaryotes.

Scientists were able to confirm that it was a gigantic single-cell bacterium by poking and prodding it with a variety of scientific instruments.

The team revealed several curious mechanisms that may explain how the unwieldybacteria pushes the limits of what is theoretically possible in terms of size.

Unlike larger, multicellular organisms like us that have a variety of internal and external structures in their cells like the nucleus,bacteria are a group of organisms called prokaryotes, which have no internal or external structures.

The internal membranes of T. magnifica hold ribosomes and DNA.

pepins is a reference to the small seeds found inside fruit such as watermelon or kiwi.

The study authors write that T. magnifica is a challenge to the idea of a bacterial cell.

It is possible for T. magnifica to distribute out the machinery that makes the energy currency of cells.

The only place to put the machines is in the cell envelope, which is the part of the body that protects it.

This restriction limits the size of mostbacteria cells because it's difficult to transport this energy very far.

Mostbacteria can't split in half because they need to double in volume.

T. magnifica is able to overcome this constraint by detaching a small portion of itself and creating a daughter cell.

The average prokaryote has 3,935 genes, whereas T. magnifica has 11,788 genes.

The genes for sulfur oxidation and carbon fixation were found in a genetic analysis.

The authors concluded that there may be other giantbacteria out there that are hidden in plain sight.

The paper was published in a scientific journal.