The exceptions of biology: square "bacteria"

This is a very short post with something curious that I found…
Whenever we think “bacteria”, most of us immediately think of diseases, or, if you are a biologist or have ever taken a biology course, you immediately think about roundish-, corkscrew- or “stick-like”- shaped microorganisms. Click here for a good blogpost on these forms…

Prepare your mind to be blown (mine was)…
Did you know that there are square “bacteria”? The brackets are there because they are not exactly bacteria, but close enough. They are archeans, bacteria-like organisms that are usually extremophiles.
With that disclaimer, for simplicity’s sake, I will refer to these guys as bacteria.
Without further ado, I give you Haloquadratum walsbyi!

Credit: microbewiki.kenyon.edu, http://bacmap.wishartlab.com/organisms/359 and Mike Dyall-Smith.
Not all of them are perfectly square though, but I find them no less striking… I hope to be able to write a more complete post soon.
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Want to see more of the things I write? Go here for some other posts. By the way, I wrote a book!

TFB is available as an ebook (Kindle, Nook, as well as in iTunes). The price of the Kindle version was just reduced by Amazon… (:-)
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