Life on Earth Depends on Networks of Ocean Bacteria

The original version of This story appeared in Quanta Magazine.

Prochloroccus The bacteria are so small that you will have to align for about a thousand to correspond to the thickness of a human sticker. The ocean forced them: the microbes are likely most abundant Photosynthetic organization on the planet, and they create an important part – 10 to 20% – oxygen of the atmosphere. This means that life on earth depends on the approximately 3 octtillions (or 3 × 10²⁷) tiny individual cells that rise.

Biologists once considered these organisms as isolated vagabonds, drifting in an immense unfathomable. But the Prochloroccus The population can be more connected than anyone could have imagined. They can hold conversations over large distances, not only by filling the ocean with information and nutrient envelopes, but also binding what we thought to be their private interior spaces with the interiors of other cells.

At the University of Córdoba in Spain, not long ago, biologists slamming images of cyanobacteria under a microscope saw a cell that had developed a long slim tube and seized its neighbor. The image made them sit. It appeared to them that it was not a stroke of luck.

“We realized that cyanobacteria were linked to each other,” said María del Carmen Muñoz-MarínA microbiologist there. There were links between Prochloroccus cells, and also with another bacteria, called Synechococcus, which often lives nearby. In the images, silver bridges have linked three, four and sometimes 10 or more cells.

Muñoz-Marín had an intuition on the identity of these mysterious structures. After a battery of tests, she and her colleagues recently reported that these bridges are bacterial nanotubes. For the first time in a common laboratory bacteria only 14 years ago, bacterial nanotubes are cellular membrane structures which allow nutrients and resources to circulate between two or more cells.

The structures were A source of fascination and controversy Over the past decade, because microbiologists have worked to understand what makes them train and what is moving exactly among these network cells. The images of the Muñoz-Marín laboratory marked the first time that these structures have been seen in cyanobacteria responsible for a large part of the photosynthesis of the earth.

They question the fundamental ideas on bacteria, raising questions such as: how much Prochloroccus Share with the cells around him? And is it really logical to think about it, and other bacteria, like a single cell?

Totally tubular

Many bacteria have active social life. Some make pili, protein hair growth that connects two cells to allow them to exchange DNA. Some form dense plates together, called biofilms. And many emit tiny bubbles called vesicles which contain DNA, RNA or other chemicals, such as messages in a bottle for the cell that intercepts them.

These are vesicles that Muñoz-Marín and his colleagues, including José Manuel García-Fernández, microbiologist at the University of Cordoba, and a graduate student Elisa Angulo-Cánovaswere looking for themselves Prochloroccus And Synechoccus in a dish. When they saw what they suspected of being nanotubes, it was a surprise.