Largest Bacterium Ever Found is Surprisingly Complex
upstart writes:
'Microorganism' is a misnomer when it comes to centimetre-long Thiomargarita magnifica:
Lurking on rotting leaves sunken in the mangroves of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean live some extraordinary thread-like creatures. These filament-like organisms, up to a centimetre in length, are the biggest single-cell bacteria yet to be found. Named Thiomargarita magnifica, they live by oxidizing sulfur, and are 50 times bigger than any other known bacteria.
[...] There are other whoppers in the Thiomargarita bacteria family, but the next-largest is only around 750 micrometres in length. Other filament-like bacteria are also found in the mangroves, but these all consist of tens or hundreds of cells. "What is very unique about the T. magnifica is that the entire filament, which is among the longest filaments in the mangrove, is just one cell," says Volland.
[...] Now that T. magnifica has been discovered, Gros expects other teams to go off in search of even larger bacteria - which might be hidden in plain sight, he says. Petra Levin at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, says that the discovery challenges conventional wisdom that bacteria have lower size limits than eukaryotic cells. "There's probably an upper limit on cell size at some point, but I don't think it will be peculiar to bacteria or archaea or eukaryotes."
"We really should not underestimate evolution, because we can't guess where it's going to go," says Levin. "I would not have guessed this thing exists, but now that I see it, I can see the logic in the evolution to this point."
Journal Reference:
Volland, J.-M. et al. Science 376, 1453-1458 (2022). DOI: 10.1101/2022.02.16.480423
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