The recently discovered bacterium is so large, it can be seen easily with the naked eye. But size isn’t its only astonishing trait
We usually think of bacteria as organisms so small they can be seen only through a microscope. But scientists discovered a giant white bacterium lurking on rotting leaves in the brackish waters of a red mangrove swamp in Guadeloupe in the Lesser Antilles.
Petra Anne Levin, a microbiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, who was not involved in the discovery isn’t surprised by its size. “The main take-home message is that we shouldn't underestimate bacteria as simple organisms because that definition is outdated,” she says. “Bacteria are endlessly adaptable, and we should expect to see them in a wide variety of sizes.”
The newly discovered bacterium defies this definition because it packages its genetic material in compartments surrounded by membranes that resemble a primitive nucleus. The scientists in Gros’s lab tried to characterize these filaments, which they originally thought were a fungus or some other multicellular organism. But their early analyses hinted that these microbes probably belonged to the family of giantVolland, who was a postdoctoral fellow in Gros’s lab joined Shailesh Date, founder and chief executive officer of the Laboratory for Research in Complex Systems in Menlo Park, to continue the quest to characterize this strange specimen.
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