I was listening to radiolab and they mentioned that bacteria are usually 100s of times bigger than viruses. I’ve never really had a good sense of the relative sizes of microscopic things, but always wanted to.
So if a virus was human sized, would a bacteria be building-sized? Would an atom be the size of a penny? Basically, if you were to map the microscopic world onto the visible world, what would things be?
In: Biology
Depends on the atom if we really want to be pedantic, but I won’t go that far (someone else may).
Depends on which virus and which bacteria, too, both have quite a wide range depending on the species/group.
But yes – roughly put, if a virus were human sized you could conceivably have some bacteria that might be the size of an average house or small apartment building. A virus is, basically, a coil of genetic material (RNA or DNA) with a shell around it. A bacteria has a whole suite of tiny organ-like features inside it, one of which is its own coil of DNA but others do things like metabolism, respiration, moving nutrients around, etc. Bacteria range in size just the same as birds do. Imagine a hummingbird as compared to an eagle or a swan, bacteria follow a similar range of sizes (just at a much smaller scale). Viruses do, too, but their larger sizes are much rarer. The very largest viruses are about as large as the very smallest bacteria, but where bacteria count in the hundreds or thousands of types at this scale, viruses only have a handful of extra-large ‘species’.
In real life, most bacteria are visible under a microscope like you might use in gradeschool or highschool, a virus is not. A virus is quite tiny by comparison, and except for the largest ones mentioned you can’t see them under a microscope. This is part of what makes viral diseases like COVID so difficult, you can’t just check them out under a microscope. You need highly specialized equipment, and even then you are often limited to inferences and eliminating possibilities as opposed to direct observation. There are a few micrscopes that can resolve a virus but these are … that’s another story.
On the imaginary scale an atom would still be vanishingly tiny, however. Even a simple virus can contain millions of atoms in its constituent molecules. If a virus was the size of a human, an atom may still be microscopic. Atoms are *really* tiny. An atom compared to a virus would be smaller than a brick compared to a skyscraper. It’s an interesting question, let’s see if someone does the math.
Latest Answers