Thiomargarita magnifica, a massively polyploid filamentous bacterium.
It crosses my mind to compare this with a filamentous colony, minus the cell divisions.
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Interesting article, which though not yet peer- reviewed, may challenge the traditional bacterial diet of E. coli.
The article has a One Sentence Summary: T. magnifica are compartmentalized centimeter-long bacteria. The ultimate in précis.
I have selected a few bits about this yet to be officially named Thiomargarita magnifica, that intrigued & educated me.
P4. Line 30. T. magnifica has a genome as large as the baker yeast S. cerevisiae and contains more genes than the model fungus Aspergillus nidulans.
P5. Dimorphic developmental cycle of T. magnifica. …… possibly representing a case of convergent evolution of developmental cycle across domains.
(These bacteria practising novel ways to reproduce long before we had microbiologists writing about them.)
P5. Line 20. It is possible that an increased number of cell elongation genes, coupled with the lack of key cell division genes, may be responsible for producing the unusually long filaments of T. magnifica.
I’m not finished reading it yet, but I wanted to say thank you for bringing this to our attention.