
Bacterial cells are small 'eyeballs', scientists discover - Marinlemaignan
http://www.sciencealert.com/bacterial-cells-are-actually-the-world-s-smallest-eyeballs-scientists-discover-by-accident
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marshray
* Scientists knew bacteria could sense the direction of light.

* Scientists had been looking at bacteria under a microscope for 340 years.

* Just the other day, someone noticed how bacteria focus light.

If you ever think there's nothing interesting left to discover in your field,
read this again!

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proc0
Hmm, that diagram is a little misleading. It's not like the bacteria are
processing the images in any way, right?! They are merely detecting light and
its direction so they can swim that way. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, I
guess, but I'd by extremely surprised if there was any sort of image
recognition at the cellular level.

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VeilEm
Eyes don't process information, they're a sensor. In an animal its brain, a
multi-celled organ, processes the information.

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gnaritas
Actually they do, and beyond that, the retina contains neurons that do the
basic processing before travelling down the optic nerve to the brain. The
retina is also basically brain tissue and is part of the central nervous
system.

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pygy_
Indeed, among other things, they detect edges, movement, and preprocess color
from RGB to something conceptually closer to YUV (with color encoded along two
contrast axes: red-green and blue-yellow).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YUV)

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adinb
If we can figure out some way to capture and transmit what these (and possibly
other bacterial species see), we could have trillions of little cameras
everywhere, possibly changing everything from medicine (deliver medical
payload based of off visual information or image tumor directly without
surgery) to biology (pseudo xenobiology studying the underwater volcanic mats
of bacteria and algae) to even intelligence gathering (need to spy? Grow some
bacteria in an air vent or other convenient area).

I hope that someone is starting to try and capture images from those mini
eyeballs, they then become our mini bio-cameras.

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spatulan
Seems similar to this
[http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150701133348.ht...](http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150701133348.htm)

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aubergene
The diagram showing the DSLR with the image the right way up as opposed to the
eyes, is misleading as the camera is also captured upside down and then
flipped in software.

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norea-armozel
I thought it was already established that the genes for photosensitivity led
to the formation of eyes in all animals. And that the proposed benefit in the
early Earth's oceans was to keep bacteria from frying themselves if they got
too close to the surface (due to there being no ozone layer way back then).
So, I'm not sure if this is all earth shattering knowledge at this point, but
it's still a fun read.

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plumeria
"But it's a vital trick for the bacteria. Without sensing light and moving
toward it, the organisms wouldn't be able to photosynthesise, which has been
crucial to their survival since time immemorial."

Can this be applied somehow to treat bacterial infections?

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swayvil
A mass of a million bacterial eyeballs probably resolves images pretty well.
Maybe better than us.

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stephengillie
If you subscribe to the belief that we're basically a bacterial mat of about
37 trillion [1] cells, each extremely large and complex on its own - it's not
too large a jump to interpret the eye as being a 1 billion cell "bacterial
sub-mat" that does primitive image capture to support the overall bacterial
mat.

[1] [http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-
are-372-trill...](http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/there-
are-372-trillion-cells-in-your-body-4941473/)

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meric
That would make us hiveminds.

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justinjlynn
You think you decide to be hungry? In a very real way, we are.

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bbcbasic
This freaks me out! Whoever me is? :-o

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shultays
Billions of billions bacterials are watching ours every move. This have a
movie potentials

