A SHOCKINGLY large bacteria has been seen swimming in mangroves of the Caribbean.
Researchers discovered a strand of bacteria that’s lengthy enough to be seen with the naked eye.
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The average bacteria is normally a few micrometers – tens of thousandths of a centimeter.
At the size of an eyelash, Thiomargarita magnifica is the largest bacteria ever discovered and it’s visible to the human eye.
Jean-Marie Volland led a study published in Science on super-sized bacteria measuring nearly a full centimeter.
They wrote “These cells grow orders of magnitude over theoretical limits for bacterial cell size.”
Volland said it stands out from average bacteria like a person “encountering another human as tall as Mount Everest,” in a video for JGI.
Bacteria are single-celled organisms and lack many of the natural traits that large, complex organisms have to support their size.
T. magnifica defied a lot of biological standards by growing so large.
Normally, DNA will drift freely in the membrane of the bacteria cell because it has no nucleus to house the DNA molecules – this prevents most DNA cells from getting larger than a few micrometers, according to The New York Times.
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But T. magnifica does have compartments for DNA, which is another observational first for bacteria.
“We found there are structures within this bacteria which contain the DNA and that is those structures compartmentalize the DNA from the rest of the cytoplasm,” Volland said.
“That is something unique, it has not been observed in bacteria before.”
The marine biologist who originally discovered T. magnifica in the wild told The New York Times that he has not seen anymore of the massive bacteria.
Scientists will try to replicate and grow the massive bacteria in a lab for further observation.
