Giant: Meet a bacterium that is visible to the naked eye

Meet Thiomargarita magnifica, a one-centimetre-long bacterium visible to the naked eye. It is 5,000 times larger than most bacteria, which typically measure two micrometres in size. “To put it into context, it would be like a human encountering another human as tall as Mount Everest,” Jean-Marie Volland from the US Department of Energy (DOE) Joint Genome Institute (JGI) and one of the scientists behind the discovery, said in a press briefing June 21, 2022. Volland and his team announced their discovery in the journal Science. Photo: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
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