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Approved For Release 2003/04/18 : CIA-RDP96-00789R003900560002-7
THE
LIGHT .
FOR . ALL
THURSDAY, MARCH 18,1993 . VOLUME 312, NUMBER 105
BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
SUN.
HOME DELIVERY: 25¢ (In most
Hyphen-sized creature found to be biggest germ
By Natalie Angier
New York Times News Service
Flouting the scientific canon that
il bacteria are microscopic, re-
earchers have discovered a strain
o-huge that it can be seen with the
laked eye.
The single-celled organism,
plucked from the bowels of an Aus-
rallan fish, is about the size of a
lyphen in a newspaper, making it
y far the largest bacterium ever de-
ected.
In measuring more than one-fifti-
Naked eye able to see single-celled giant
eth of an inch in length and possess-
ing a volume a million times that of
the common E. coli microbe, the
newly discovered bacterium seems to
defy laws of biology that limit how
big a simple bacterial cell can grow.
So outsized Is the creature that
researchers may soon be able to use
It to begin exploring the intimate de-
tails of bacterial innards, a task im-
possible with the tinler species of mi-
crobes.
"It's so huge that we could stick
electrodes into it," said Esther R. An -:
gert of Indiana University in Bloom-
ington. "There's a world of cell physi-
ology that could be done with this
thing."
The researcher, who is finishing
Norman Pace, performed the experi-
ments that demonstrated the bacte-
rial nature of the beast.
She showed that despite it's ex-
traordinary dimensions, the orga
ism's genes bore all the earmarks
a bacterium. The report of the gia
bacterium, called Epulopiscium fis
elsoni, appears today in the Britis
journal Nature.
"I think it's incredibly excitir
" and it's an extremely convincing p
per," said Dr. James R. Lupski
Baylor College of Medicine in Hou
genetics. "The old way of defining
bacterium was to look under a m
See BACTERIA, 15A, Col.
Hyphen-sized blob found
to be world's biggest germ
Naked eye able
to see creature
BACTERIA, from 1A
.
croscope, see what size it was and
whether it stained one way or anoth-
er. Now we're redefining life forms
based on what kind of DNA they
have."
Commanding though the bacteri-
um is, it may not be the world's larg-
est.
Realizing that bacteria have the
ability to grow beyond boundaries
previously set for them, scientists
may well find other examples of sin-
gle-celled beings with macroscopic
aspirations.
"This type of study points to how
little we know about microbial diver-
sity," Ms. Angert sald. "Here's this
huge organism that seems to be a
significant part of a fish's intestines,
and it's just recently been discov-
ered. Who can say what else is out
there waiting to be found?"
Scientists have long believed that
bacteria as so-called prokaryotes
cellular organization for swift move-
ment of nutrients and oxygen inside
them, must rely on slow diffusion to
wrest what they need from their sur-
roundings. So they must remain very
tiny to allow essential molecules to
drift from one part of the cell to an-
other.
By comparison, the cells of higher
organisms, such as yeast, algae, in-
sects and humans, are eukaryotes
and have small internal structures to
ferry molecules about.
Pulverizing the genetic material
from the bacteria, the researchers
multiplied the DNA into millions of
copies through the use of a technique
called polymerase chain reaction.
They next compared the genes
with those from many other known
prokaryotes and eukaryotes and
demonstrated that E. fishelsoni is a
true bacterium.
Indeed, when the organism was
discovered in 1985 by Israeli re-
searchers who found it in the intes-
tinal tract of common brown sur-
geonfish living in the Red Sea, they
thought it must be an alga, protozo-
an or other eukaryote.
More recently, Kendall D. Clem-
ents of James Cook University in
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