You might think that the best chemists on earth are humans, living perhaps in Cambridge, Heidelberg, Paris, Tokyo or Shenzhen, beavering away in laboratories filled with glassware, extraction hoods and other human-made things. But then you would be discounting a multitude of bacteria that have cracked all sorts of chemistry problems over the course of their long evolution, and that still harbour secrets about how they manipulate molecules. One inventive clade of bacteria, the cyanobacteria, quite literally changed the world, and built the foundations of modern life.
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