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# This Microbe Ditched So Many Genes It Can't Feed Itself
- URL: https://www.gottabekidding.me/this-microbe-ditched-so-many-genes-it-cant-feed-itself/
- Published: 2026-11-11T11:04:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-11-11T11:03:59.000Z
- Description: It cannot feed itself, yet it may still count as a cell of its own. One-fourth of its DNA does a job nobody has figured out.
- Author: Field Notes
- Tags: Nature

Somewhere in the ocean's plankton lives a microbe whose genome is so small that the previous archaeal record holder could fit it inside twice. Nobody has ever laid eyes on one. It is known only from its DNA.

It is one of the archaea, single-celled life on a branch well apart from bacteria. An international team with researchers at Nottingham and Japan's University of Tsukuba found it while sequencing individual plankton cells and reported the discovery in Current Biology. Its genome carries only 189 genes that code for proteins.

The stranger part is what it discarded. Nearly every gene for making its own food and energy is gone, which researchers read as heavy dependence on other organisms. Yet it held on to much of the equipment for copying its DNA and turning those genes into proteins.

That combination is unusual. Mitochondria and chloroplasts, once free-living bacteria, shed genes too, but they rely on the cells housing them for part of that copying work. This microbe appears to have kept the job for itself. Nottingham's Thorsten Allers, a co-author, said it may sit near the smallest amount of genetic information a cell can carry and still stand on its own.

Roughly one-fourth of its DNA codes for oversized membrane proteins whose purpose nobody can yet explain. Some parasitic archaea carry similar ones, which leaves open the possibility that this microbe lives as a parasite in or beside some other organism. What that host is remains unknown. Related sequences in seawater samples hint at a far larger group that has mostly escaped notice.

Its formal name, Candidatus Sukunaarchaeum mirabile, nods to a small god from Japanese tradition. The genome, at least, has lived up to the small part.

**Read the full story at** [University of Nottingham, October 12, 2026](https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/news/tiny-marine-microbe?ref=gottabekidding.me)

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**Hot Take:** Relies on others for every meal and still qualifies as independent. House cats have been filing that exact claim for millennia.