A centimetre-long bacterium
Volland and colleagues described Candidatus Thiomargarita magnifica, a bacterium with an average cell length above 9,000 micrometres. It holds more than half a million copies of a very large genome, kept with its protein-making machinery inside membrane-bound compartments, challenging traditional ideas of what a bacterial cell can be.
As reported in: Volland, Gonzalez-Rizzo, Gros et al. (2022). A centimeter-long bacterium with DNA contained in metabolically active, membrane-bound organelles. Science. doi:10.1126/science.abb3634