In this video, we're going to talk about some features of bacterial cells, which we know are prokaryotic cells that do not have a nucleus. Now, bacteria are actually the most abundant and the most diverse organisms on Earth, and that's because bacteria are the most ancient organisms on Earth. They're the ones that have been around the longest. Now, bacterial DNA is specifically circular in its shape, and again because bacteria are prokaryotic and they do not have a nucleus, the circular DNA is going to be found in a region that's called the nucleoid. And so the nucleoid is just the name of the specific region where the bacteria's circular DNA can be found.
Now bacteria, like all cells, have structures that are called ribosomes. And ribosomes, we'll get to talk more about these later in our course, but really what you need to know is that ribosomes are found in every single cell and ribosomes are specifically used for building proteins. Now once again, all cells have ribosomes including bacteria, but bacteria, specifically have really, really small ribosomes that we call 70S ribosomes. And the "s" here, is something that we're not going to worry about in our course. It's just a unit, that's referring to the size here of the ribosome, and the 70 here is just the number that goes along with the unit.
Now, bacteria have really small ribosomes, and when bacteria divide or multiply into more cells, they divide by a process that's known as binary fission. And so binary fission is a simple process in, with respect to how eukaryotic cells divide, which is a much more complex process. So let's take a look at our image down below so that we can clear some of these things up. So notice that we're showing you the bacterial cell here, and notice that the DNA that we see, right here, this blue circle, represents the circular DNA in the nucleoid. And so once again, the nucleoid is just the region where the circular DNA can be found within bacteria.
Also, notice that throughout the cell we have all of these orange dots, and these orange dots represent ribosomes. So notice that we're zooming in here to one of these orange dots. And ribosomes, again, we'll talk more about them later in our course, but basically they are specific for building proteins, and so all cells have ribosomes. But once again, bacteria, they have really really small ribosomes that we call 70S ribosomes. And so this here is representing a 70S ribosome, a small ribosome that bacteria cells have. And so this here concludes our introduction to the features of bacterial cells, and we'll be able to compare this to features of eukaryotic cells as we move forward in our course.
So I'll see you all in our next video.