The unique model of this story appeared in Quanta Journal.
Prochlorococcus micro organism are so small that you just’d must line up round a thousand of them to match the thickness of a human thumbnail. The ocean seethes with them: The microbes are probably essentially the most considerable photosynthetic organism on the planet, and so they create a good portion—10 p.c to twenty p.c—of the ambiance’s oxygen. That signifies that life on Earth is determined by 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 vast distances, not solely filling the ocean with envelopes of knowledge and vitamins, but in addition linking what we thought had been their personal, inside areas with the interiors of different cells.
On the College of Córdoba in Spain, not way back, biologists snapping photographs of the cyanobacteria underneath a microscope noticed a cell that had grown a protracted, 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, referred to as Synechococcus, which regularly lives close by. Within the photographs, silvery bridges linked three, 4, and typically 10 or extra cells.
Muñoz-Marín had a hunch concerning the identification of those mysterious constructions. After a battery of exams, she and her colleagues not too long ago reported that these bridges are bacterial nanotubes. First noticed in a standard lab bacterium solely 14 years in the past, bacterial nanotubes are constructions made from cell membrane that permit vitamins and sources to stream between two or extra cells.
The constructions have been a supply of fascination and controversy over the past decade, as microbiologists have labored to grasp what causes them to type and what, precisely, travels amongst these networked cells. The photographs from Muñoz-Marín’s lab marked the primary time these constructions have been seen within the cyanobacteria answerable for a lot of the Earth’s photosynthesis.
They problem elementary 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 consider it, and different micro organism, as single-celled?
Completely Tubular
Many micro organism have lively social lives. Some make pili, hairlike growths of protein that hyperlink two cells to permit them to alternate DNA. Some type dense plaques collectively, often known as biofilms. And plenty of emit tiny bubbles often known as vesicles that include DNA, RNA or different chemical compounds, 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.
