-
Asked by courteney to Ed, Katie, Sam, Steve, Vera on 18 Jun 2011.
-
Vera Weisbecker answered on 16 Jun 2011:
Slime molds! They are flat fungi that cover the ground like a film. Some of these form a single cell with lots of nuclei that can be huge – google says they can be up to 30 sqare meters large (that is the surface of a medium-sized room!). I once was told that a professor who worked on slime molds at my uni was given a “birthday gift” of a giant slime mold. His lab co-workers had fed a slime mold blob on its outer fringes, causing it to cover more and more ground as it grew outwards to digest the food.
If you feel like bagging lots of cell nuclei is “cheating”, then as far as I know the largest single cells with only one nucelus are found in the group of foraminifera – these are ocean-living organisms looking a bit like a group of bubbles. These can be 1 cm long or (in fossil forms) even longer. “Normal” cells can generally not be seen with the naked eye.
-
-
Ed Morrison answered on 16 Jun 2011:
I always thought the largest cell was the ostrich egg, but I could be wrong.
-
Sam Tazzyman answered on 16 Jun 2011:
That’s really interesting about slime moulds, Vera! Does that mean you could grow one as large as you had space for? Or is there some maximum size they can’t get bigger than?
-
-
Steven Daly answered on 18 Jun 2011:
I knew slime moulds had recreated the road map of britain when food was placed in the relative position cities would be in, that was a strange paper I still do not know why I read that!
The one thing I do know about large cells is that nerve cells can sometimes extend for a long way, 10s of cms. And that if you have good eyesight, human egg cells are just about visible to the naked eye.
Comments