Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is far more interconnected than anyone realized.
Prochlorococcus bacteria are so small that you’d have to line up around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are likely the most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, and they create a significant portion—10 percent to 20 percent—of the atmosphere’s oxygen. That means that life on Earth depends on the roughly 3 octillion tiny individual cells toiling away.
“The results were so shocking in the field of marine cyanobacteria that we were, on the one hand, amazed, and on the other hand, we wanted to be completely sure.” They put the cells under four radically different kinds of imaging devices—not only a transmission electron microscope, which they had been using when they first spotted the structures, but also a fluorescence microscope, a scanning electron microscope, and an imaging flow cytometer, which images live cells as they zip by.
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