Stentor

These trumpet-shaped organisms are made of just a single cell, even though they can reach a few millimeters in length and are therefore visible to the naked eye. For a single cell, stentors are also extremely complex and somewhat mysterious in their ability to regenerate parts that are broken off. Scientists don’t know how they do it, but are trying to unravel the secret in the hopes of learning something that could be applied to regenerative medicine. Another remarkable feature of stentors is that they store hundreds of thousands of copies of their genome in their oversized single-cell body, while our cells only contain two copies. According to a recent study, stentors — though lacking a nervous system — show complex and predictable behavior modifications to escape harm, proving that non-neuronal organisms are capable of processing information and acting consequently.