Randy Holmes-Farley
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To a bacteria, at least.
This article has some really interesting information in it:
How microbes survive in the open ocean
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6352/646.full
For example:
"To emphasize the remarkable balance between cellular needs and supply, consider that open-ocean concentrations of ammonium ions—the preferred inorganic source of nitrogen for P. marina—are often 10 nanomolar (nM) or less. Thus, ammonium molecules are distributed at a distance l of about 0.6 µm. A seawater volume of ∼0.5 µm3, equivalent to a large microbial cell of radius 0.5 µm, would thus contain less than five ammonium ions. Yet, one smaller P. marinacell requires 4 × 108 N atoms per day to divide. In other words, to reproduce, a microbial cell needs to harvest the ammonium from hundreds of millions of times its cell volume"
This article has some really interesting information in it:
How microbes survive in the open ocean
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6352/646.full
For example:
"To emphasize the remarkable balance between cellular needs and supply, consider that open-ocean concentrations of ammonium ions—the preferred inorganic source of nitrogen for P. marina—are often 10 nanomolar (nM) or less. Thus, ammonium molecules are distributed at a distance l of about 0.6 µm. A seawater volume of ∼0.5 µm3, equivalent to a large microbial cell of radius 0.5 µm, would thus contain less than five ammonium ions. Yet, one smaller P. marinacell requires 4 × 108 N atoms per day to divide. In other words, to reproduce, a microbial cell needs to harvest the ammonium from hundreds of millions of times its cell volume"