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World Service,3 mins

Solving the riddle of how bacteria see

World Update

Available for over a year

Let's talk about slime...or 'single-celled pond slime' to be exact. Biologists say they have the answer to a centuries-old mystery of how bacteria sense light and move towards it. The entire organism acts like a tiny eyeball. Despite being just three micrometres in diameter, the photo-synthetic bacteria was found to use the same physical principles as the eye of a camera or a human, which according to researchers, probably makes them the ''world's smallest example of such a lens''. Conrad Mullineaux is a Professor of Microbiology at Queen Mary University, London and co-author of the study. (PHOTO CREDIT: A view from a microscope of bacteria lit from the side - Professor Conrad Mullineaux)

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