Ditch the microscope. You don’t need one to see this bacterial behemoth. It's the size of an eyelash.
packs its DNA inside a sac surrounded by a membrane . Such a compartment is a hallmark of the larger, more complex cells of eukaryotes, a group of organisms that includes plants and animals.
Study coauthor Oliver Gros, a marine biologist at the Université des Antilles Pointe-á-Pitre in Guadeloupe, France, first discoveredwhile collecting water samples in tropical marine mangrove forests in the Caribbean’s Lesser Antilles. At first, he mistook the long, white filaments as some sort of eukaryote, Gros said at the news conference. But a few years later, genetic analyses showed that the organisms were actually bacteria.
Previous studies had predicted that bacterial cells’ overall lack of complexity meant there was a limit to how large bacteria could grow. But the new discovery is “breaking our way of thinking about bacteria,” says Ferran Garcia-Pichel, a microbiologist at Arizona State University in Tempe who was not involved with the study. When it comes to bacteria, people typically think small and simple. But that mindset may make researchers miss lots of other bacterial species, Garcia-Pichel says.
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