Science
Scientists Discover World’s Largest Bacterium, The Size Of An Eyelash
(CTN News) – In a swamp in Guadeloupe, scientists discovered the world’s largest known bacterium, Thiomargarita Magnifica, the first organism to be visible to the human eye.
The Guardian reported. The bacteria was discovered in shallow tropical marine marshes by Olivier Gros, a marine biology professor at the Université des Antilles in Guadeloupe, and appears as white filaments.
A bacteria of such size was considered impossible by scientists, so the discovery shocked them.
World’s Largest Bacterium
Gros said, “I thought they were strange when I saw them.” Gros found that the strands were single cells with membrane-bound compartments throughout the cell.
Volland, a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who co-authored the study with Gros, said the latter was “unexpected” for a bacterium.
Furthermore, the bacterium contained three times as many genes as most bacteria, as well as several hundred thousand copies of its genome.
There are still many theories about how the bacteria grew so big.
In other parts of the world, the bacterium has not yet been discovered.
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