The original version of This story appeared in How much magazine.
Prochlorococcus The bacteria are so small that you need to lines around a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. Oceans have seethes to them: likely germs The most abundant Photosynthetic organism on the planet, and they create a significant component – 10 percent to 20 percent – of the environment's oxygen. This means that life in the world depends on approximately 3 ocillion (or 3 × 1027) small individual cells walking.
Biologists sometimes think of these organisms as isolated wanderers, who have grown in an irresistible galaxy. But the Prochlorococcus The population may be more connected than anyone might think. They can hold talks throughout the wide distances, not only filling the ocean of information envelopes and nutrition, but also linked to what we think private, internal spaces with interiors of other other cell.
At the University of Córdoba in Spain, not yet, biologists who have been lying cyanobacteria images under a microscope have seen a cell growing a long, thin tube and touching its neighbor. The image is sitting with them. It appeared to them that it was not a fluke.
“We realize that cyanobacteria is connected to each other,” said María del Carmen Muñoz-MarínA microbiologist there. There are links between Prochlorococcus cells, and also includes another bacteria, called Synechococcus, which often lives nearby. In images, silver bridges are linked to three, four, and sometimes 10 or more cells.
Muñoz-Marín had a hunting about the identity of these mysterious structures. After a battery of trials, he and his colleagues recently —the only reported That these bridges are bacteria that are nanotubes. Firstly observed in a standard lab bacterium only 14 years ago, bacterial nanotubes were structures made of cell membrane that allow nutrition and resources to flow between two or more cells.
Structures have been a resource of amazing and controversy In the past decade, as microbiologists have worked to understand what caused them to develop and what, exactly, traveling to these networks. Images from Muñoz-Marín's lab marked the first time these structures were seen in Cyanobacteria responsible for Earth's excess photosynthesis.
They challenge basic ideas about bacteria, raising questions such as: How much do Prochlorococcus Share with cells around it? And it really makes sense to think about it, and other bacteria, as single-celled?
Completely tubular
Many bacteria have Active social life. Some produce almonds, growing protein hairlike that connects two cells to allow them to exchange DNA. Some form dense plaques together, known as Biofilms. And many are coming out small bubbles known as vesicles It contains DNA, RNA or other chemicals, such as messages in a bottle for any cell that happens to interfere with them.
These are the vesicles Muñoz-Mañoz-Marín and his Colles, including José Manuel García-Fernandez, a micrologist at the University of Córdoba, and a graduate student. Elisa Angulo-Cánovaswere looking for while lying in Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus In a dish. When they saw the suspected nanotubes, it was a surprise.
