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At a full centimetre long, this is the largest species of bacterium yet discovered. It was found in a mangrove swamp in Guadeloupe by Jean-Marie Volland of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, in California, and his colleagues. They have dubbed it Thiomargarita magnifica in a paper just published in Science. To supply its elongated body with appropriate biomolecules, it contains half a million copies of the circular dna molecules that constitute its genome, each doing its thing locally to keep the organism alive.
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