Thursday, February 04, 2010
Living beach ball, another giant single cell
A while ago I bloggged on Giant Single Cells. Here's another one courtesy of New Scientist
The single-celled xenophyophores shun the convention that single cells are microscopic. Syringammina is a brute, growing to a width of 10 centimetres, sometimes even twice that.
The cell branches and splits into hundreds of tubes, which ramify and interconnect in a hugely complex network. It also bends the single-cell convention of having only a single nucleus: Syringammina has many, scattered throughout its tubes.
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