
Prochlorococcus
2.50 billion years ago
The Invisible Lung
For over a century, oceanographers studied the sea by pouring water through filters. The standard mesh size was 1 micrometre. They assumed anything smaller was just debris or viruses, not life capable of photosynthesis. They were wrong.
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For over a century, oceanographers studied the sea by pouring water through filters. The standard mesh size was 1 micrometre. They assumed anything smaller was just debris or viruses, not life capable of photosynthesis. They were wrong.
In 1988, Sallie Chisholm and Robert Olson took a flow cytometer — a laser-based cell counter usually used for blood work — onto a ship in the Sargasso Sea. When they looked at the scatter plots, they saw a "noise" signal of tiny, dim red flashes. It wasn't noise. It was Prochlorococcus — a cell so small (0.6 micrometres) it had been slipping through the nets of science for generations. The most abundant photosynthetic organism on the planet, and we had missed it entirely.






























































