The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal.
Prochlorococcus micro organism are so small that you just’d need to line up round a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are seemingly essentially the most considerable photosynthetic organism on the planet, they usually create a good portion—10 p.c to twenty p.c—of the environment’s oxygen. That implies that life on Earth relies on the roughly 3 octillion (or 3 × 1027) tiny particular person cells toiling away.
Biologists as soon as considered these organisms as remoted wanderers, adrift in an unfathomable vastness. However the Prochlorococcus inhabitants could also be extra related than anybody might have imagined. They could be holding conversations throughout huge distances, not solely filling the ocean with envelopes of knowledge and vitamins, but in addition linking what we thought had been their non-public, interior areas with the interiors of different cells.
On the College of Córdoba in Spain, not way back, biologists snapping pictures of the cyanobacteria below a microscope noticed a cell that had grown an extended, skinny tube and grabbed maintain of its neighbor. The picture made them sit up. It dawned on them that this was not a fluke.
“We realized the cyanobacteria had been related to one another,” mentioned María del Carmen Muñoz-Marín, a microbiologist there. There have been hyperlinks between Prochlorococcus cells, and in addition with one other bacterium, known as Synechococcus, which frequently lives close by. Within the pictures, silvery bridges linked three, 4, and generally 10 or extra cells.
Muñoz-Marín had a hunch in regards to the identification of those mysterious buildings. After a battery of assessments, she and her colleagues just lately reported that these bridges are bacterial nanotubes. First noticed in a typical lab bacterium solely 14 years in the past, bacterial nanotubes are buildings fabricated from cell membrane that permit vitamins and sources to stream between two or extra cells.
The buildings have been a supply of fascination and controversy over the past decade, as microbiologists have labored to know what causes them to kind and what, precisely, travels amongst these networked cells. The photographs from Muñoz-Marín’s lab marked the primary time these buildings have been seen within the cyanobacteria accountable for a lot of the Earth’s photosynthesis.
They problem basic concepts about micro organism, elevating questions akin to: How a lot does Prochlorococcus share with the cells round it? And does it actually make sense to think about it, and different micro organism, as single-celled?
Completely Tubular
Many micro organism have energetic social lives. Some make pili, hairlike growths of protein that hyperlink two cells to permit them to trade DNA. Some kind dense plaques collectively, often known as biofilms. And plenty of emit tiny bubbles often known as vesicles that include DNA, RNA or different chemical substances, like messages in a bottle for no matter cell occurs to intercept them.
It was vesicles that Muñoz-Marín and her colleagues, together with José Manuel García-Fernández, a microbiologist on the College of Córdoba, and graduate pupil Elisa Angulo-Cánovas, had been in search of as they zoomed in on Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus in a dish. Once they noticed what they suspected had been nanotubes, it was a shock.
