Scientists who hail from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy claim to have succeeded in obtaining microscopic images of the smallest organisms on our planet, where this particular discovery has been hailed, and in detail to boot, over in the Journal Nature Communications.
The unique bacterium is not rare at all, but is common enough to be seen in groundwater, where it comes with cells that have a volume of approximately 0.009 cubic microns. Just to get a better idea on how small these are, 150,000 cells are able to fit on the tip of human hair or 150 of the bacteria can be crammed into a single cell of Escherichia coli. Now that they have been caught on camera, we do wonder what the next frontier is in terms of size when it comes to bacteria – have we been missing out on something that is far smaller all these years?