A giant bacterium 5,000 times larger than normal was found in the swamps of Guadalupe.
The bacteria are large enough to be seen with the naked eye.
Giant microbes are the same as meeting Everest-sized siblings.
This 1 cm long bacterium is absolutely huge in the world of bushes. Normally, it can only be seen with a microscope.
Dr. Jean-Marie Warland, lead author from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said:
“In context, it’s like meeting another person like Mount Everest.”
This species belongs to the genus Thiomargarita and was named Ca. Spectacular Thiomargarita.
Co-author Sylvina Gonzalez Rizzo from the University of Guadeloupe in the Antilles archipelago explains:
“This kind of discovery raises new questions about bacterial polymorphisms that have never been studied.”
His colleague, Professor Olivier Gross, came across this amazing species in 2009 during an expedition to the mysterious mangroves of the Caribbean Sea in France.
He said: “When I saw them, I thought it was ‘strange’.
The lab ran a scan over the next two years and showed it to be a single-celled sulfur oxide prokaryote.
Professor González-Rizzo used gene sequencing to finally identify and classify prokaryotes.
He said: “I thought they were eukaryotic organisms with nuclei. At first glance, they were so big and fibrous that I didn’t think they were bacteria.”
We realized that they were unique because they looked like a single cell. The fact that they are “macro” microorganisms was fascinating.
Further analysis determined Ca. T. magnifica plays an important role in tropical coastal forests, one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet.
The trees grow in salt water and are home to fish, shellfish and many other species.
“Tangerines and their microbial flora are important ecosystems for carbon cycling,” said Dr. Tanja Voic, lead author from the Joint Energy Genome Institute (JGI).
“If you look at the space they occupy globally, it’s less than 1% of the world’s coastal areas.
However, if you look at carbon storage, you can see that it contains 10-15% of the carbon stored in coastal sediments.
He added: “Because the large sulfur bacteria turned out to be a symbiont hotspot, we started this project in line with JGI’s strategic goals for inter-organism interaction, but this project has taken us in a completely different direction. It took me to that.”
Modern scanners visually observe large cells in three dimensions at high magnification and subtle detail. The total length of the thread was up to 9.66 mm.
The images confirmed that these are single-celled filaments rather than multicellular filaments, common in other large sulfur bacteria.
They also identified new membrane-bound cleavages that contained complex DNA and numerous clusters. It is called “pepin” because of the small seeds in the fruit.
“Bacteria contain three times as many genes as most bacteria and hundreds of thousands of genome copies distributed throughout the cell,” said Dr. Woland.
Next, single-cell genomics analyzed five bacterial cells at the molecular level. This is the enhancement, reflection and placement of the genome.
A labeling method called BONCAT revealed protein-producing activity, indicating that the entire bacterial cell is active.
It paves the way to answer many questions, including the role of bacteria in ecosystems.
Dr Warland said: “We know that we are growing and thriving in the mangroves of the Caribbean.
“Regarding metabolism, we carry out chemical synthesis, which is a process similar to photosynthesis in plants.”
Another mystery is whether pepina played a role in the extreme evolution of thiomargarita magnifica and whether it exists in other bacterial species.
Their exact formation and how molecular processes occur and are regulated within and outside of these structures have yet to be studied.
The researchers believe that successful cultivation of bacteria in the laboratory has provided some answers.
“If we can store these bacteria in the lab, we can use techniques that are currently impossible,” says Dr. Voick.
Professor Gross wants to see other large bacteria. He states: “People may have seen them because they can look at some microscopes to see what Pepin looks like, but they don’t understand what they are.
“It would be very interesting to see if Pepin is already everywhere.”
Dr. Sheiles Date, founder and executive director of the Complex Systems Institute in Menlo Park, California, said:
“One of the things we’ve been discussing is that we need to study biological complexity in more detail than what’s going on right now, so I think it’s very simple. Organisms can be surprised.
Source: Metro
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