![]() ![]() ![]() A human egg cell can reach about 120 microns in diameter, or five one-thousandths of an inch. While our cells are also invisible to the naked eye, they are typically much larger than those of bacteria. We humans are multicellular organisms, our bodies made up of about 30 trillion cells. In lakes and rivers, some bacterial cells stick together to form tiny filaments. Van Leeuwenhoek’s teeth were coated with a jellylike film containing billions of bacteria. coli cell, for example, measures about two microns, or under a ten-thousandth of an inch.Įach bacterial cell is its own organism, meaning it can grow and split into a pair of new bacteria. For the next three centuries, scientists found many more kinds of bacteria, all of which were invisible to the naked eye. When he put the dental plaque under a primitive microscope, he was astonished to see single-celled organisms swimming about. It has been about 350 years since Dutch lens grinder Antonie van Leeuwenhoek discovered bacteria by scraping his teeth. With most of the bacterial world yet to be explored, it is entirely possible that even bigger, even more complex bacteria are waiting to be discovered. But Thiomargarita magnifica turns out to be remarkably complex. Scientists once thought bacteria were too simple to produce big cells. Volland and his colleagues published their study of the bacteria, called Thiomargarita magnifica, on Thursday in the journal Science. “It would be like meeting another human the size of Mount Everest,” said Jean-Marie Volland, a microbiologist at the Joint Genome Institute in Berkeley, California. These cells are the largest bacteria ever observed, thousands of times bigger than more familiar bacteria such as Escherichia coli. NEW YORK: In a Caribbean mangrove forest, scientists have discovered a species of bacteria that grows to the size and shape of a human eyelash. (Photo: Pierre Yves Pascal/ The New York Times) The bacterial cells, named Thiomargarita magnifica are so large they are easily visible to the naked eye, challenging ideas about how large microbes can get. A photo by Pierre Yves Pascal shows mangroves in the Guadeloupe archipelago of the Caribbean, where scientists have discovered a species of bacteria that grows to the size and shape of a human eyelash. ![]()
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