At a time when more and more viruses and bacteria are being discovered and circulating on our planet – with great scientific advances – new bacteria have just been discovered, classified according to a very specific factor.

Historic discovery

A team of researchers from the University of the West Indies has just discovered an amazing bacteria in Guadeloupe. its name ? ‘Thiomargarita magnifica’, a string-shaped bacterium with a lower nucleolus discovered in Guadeloupe So, and more specifically on the surface of the decomposing mangrove leaves.

This is a historical discovery since then This bacterium represents by far the largest microbe ever analyzed. Concretely, the bacteria can be seen with the naked eye and can be up to two centimeters, or roughly the size of a single euro coin.

It took at least ten years of research for this giant microbe to be described as such. Victor Nizet, MD, a medical scientist at the University of California, San Diego, talks about the discovery “Brilliant and revealing“, specifying that bacteria”Bigger than fruit flies“.

Missing link?

But more than its size, the discovery of this bacteria represents a major advance in the study of life on Earth since thenIt could be a missing link between single-celled organisms and the cells that make up humans.

why ? Because “Thiomargarita magnifica” subtly relates characteristics of prokaryotes, which include single-celled organisms such as bacteria, and eukaryotes, which integrate multicellular life forms (plants, animals, and fungi). For Dr. Kazuhiro Takemoto, a computational biologist at the Kyushu Institute of Technology, in the Journal of Science, this megabacterium”It could be a missing link in complex cell development“.

Previously, the bacteria that set the record for the size was a giant sulfur-eating microbe that was discovered in Namibia and was just under a millimeter in size. “Thiomargarita magnifica” is 20 times larger.