Scientists Capture First Microscopy Images of Ultra-Small Bacteria

Posted on February 27, 2015

6-27Scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley have captured the first microscopy images of ultra-small bacteria. The scientists say the bacteria is believed to be about as small as life can get. The bacteria are thought to commonplace in ground water.

The tiny bacteria cells have an average volume of just 0.009 cubic microns. The scale bar in the above image is 100 nanometers. 150,000 of these cells could fit on the tip of a human hair. The researchers say the existence of ultra-small bacteria has been debated for two decades. This is the first electron microscopy evidence and DNA-based description for the microbes.

Jill Banfield, a Senior Faculty Scientist in Berkeley Lab's Earth Sciences Division and a UC Berkeley professor, says in a statement, "These newly described ultra-small bacteria are an example of a subset of the microbial life on earth that we know almost nothing about. They're enigmatic. These bacteria are detected in many environments and they probably play important roles in microbial communities and ecosystems. But we don't yet fully understand what these ultra-small bacteria do."

The microbes were discovered in groundwater collected using successively smaller filters at Rifle, Colorado. They were flash frozen to -272 degrees Celsius using a portable device called a cryo plunger. The researchers say the bacteria lack many basic functions. They have thread-like appendages called pili that may enable them to make "life support" connections to other microbes.

A research paper on the ultra-small bacteria can be found here in the journal, Nature Communications.



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