Which is the world's smallest bacteria?

The DNA of the smallest such creature to date--a bacteria called Nanoarchea was mapped.

Which is the world's smallest bacteria?
uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu
Reply:It is the mycoplasma, and because it is the smallest, it is the only bacteria that does not have cell wall...
Reply:it is mycoplasma coz thats what ive bin learning at school........


i dont know if sunshine25 is right........
Reply:"Nanobacteria." The name sounds obvious enough. They're small. They're bacteria. You might assume they resemble the smallest archaean, Nanoarchaeum, or the smallest bacterium, Mycoplasma, in size. You might assume they resemble ordinary bacteria in nature.





But instead of taking the prize as the smallest organism, nanobacteria-a tenth the size of ordinary bacteria and half as large as Nanoarchaeum and Mycoplasma-have continued to cause controversy since their description in the early 1990s by a Finnish research team led by Olavi Kajander. The team avoided overstating their claim - "These autonomously replicating particles are tentatively named nanobacteria" - but the name stuck, and many of the team's publications state that nanobacteria are alive. The spheres, covered with a hard calcium phosphate coat, were found in various fluids used to grow cells in the laboratory, such as cow serum.





Medical microbiologist Neva Ciftcioglu, now at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, her colleague Kajander and collaborators in the United States, Canada, the UK, Japan and Russia continue to research nanobacteria. But scientists in some labs say that, while they can produce the spheres and can see them with an electron microscope, they have been unable to confirm any sign of life in them.





Other scientists raise a theoretical objection, saying that at 200 nanometers, nanobacteria are just too small to contain the machinery of life. "Generally," Ciftcioglu says, "we say that a microorganism should not be any smaller than 200 nanometers. So nanobacteria is within this range, however, there are some forms we detected that they are even 80 or 50 nanometers." These smaller forms, she says, may not be complete cells.





"So the difficulty came with two reasons," Ciftcioglu says, "number one was naming; we called them bacteria before we characterized them and proved that they are bacteria. And the second difficulty was the size discussion."








http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php...