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Life on Earth Depends on Networks of Ocean Bacteria
Nanotube bridge networks grow between the most abundant photosynthetic bacteria in the oceans, suggesting that the world is far more interconnected than anyone realized.
It was vesicles that Muñoz-Marín and her colleagues, including José Manuel García-Fernández, a microbiologist at the University of Córdoba, and graduate student Elisa Angulo-Cánovas, were looking for as they zoomed in on Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus in a dish. This kind of cooperation is probably more common than people realize, said Conrad Mullineaux, a microbiologist at Queen Mary University of London—even in environments like the open ocean, where bacteria may not always be close enough to form nanotubes. Looking back at what people thought about bacterial communication when he began to study marine cyanobacteria 25 years ago, García-Fernandez is conscious that the field has undergone a sea change.
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