> Case in point: a giant bacterium called Thiomargarita magnifica can extend about one centimeter in length, so large that it can be seen by the naked eye. It does so by breaking the surface area-to-volume rule, filling between 65–80 percent of its internal volume with an empty vacuole. In other words, it pushes most of its molecules to the cell periphery, thus shortening diffusion distances.
There is also a captioned image of bubble algae in the post.
Collected and stored sediment samples were found to have surviving T. namibiensis cells after over two years. The cells had no access to any added sulfide or nitrate during this time. In the surviving cells, there was a notable size decrease. To survive without growing the cells depended on the nutrient stores of the central vacuoles.
Nice paradox
> The entire cell contains several cytoplasmic domains, with each domain having a nucleus and a few chloroplasts.
See:
"The Mimivirus is a giant virus that infects amoebae and was long considered to be a bacterium due to its size."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9133948/
Although for me, I always used the definitions through the genetic information available (genome). So as long as a virus still is a parasite, I'd hold up that definition. It will be interesting when viruses are found that are even closer to a cell, e. g. some life cycle where they could switch between parasitism and stand-alone metabolism (or some hybrid in between; I mean if they can encode whole metabolic pathways, at the least some or some parts of it, the threshold here should not be impossible to overcome, and then the whole definition of a virus also has to be adapted since it would no longer make sense).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrotransposon#Endogenous_ret...
Actually the wikipedia article states:
"It is the second largest bacterium ever discovered"
> The largest T. magnifica cell Volland found was 2 centimeters tall
https://www.science.org/content/article/largest-bacterium-ev...
Granted, they are grouped both in Thiomargarita. 2cm is pretty gigantic. What I always found more interesting was that they don't merely have just one genome.