Continent continent. From this perspective, the edge of the continental shelf is the true edge of the continent, as shorelines vary with changes in sea level. In this sense the islands of Great Britain and Ireland are part of Europe, while Australia and the island of New Guinea together form a continent. As a cultural construct, the concept of a continent may go beyond the continental shelf to include oceanic islands and continental fragments. In this way, Iceland is considered part of Europe and Madagascar part of Africa. Extrapolating the concept to its extreme, some geographers group the Australian continental plate
Smallest organisms 3.5 kilo base pairs (kb) and particle diameters of 80 nanometres (nm). The smallest double stranded DNA viruses are the hepadnaviruses such as Hepatitis B, at 3.2 kb and 42 nm; parvoviruses have smaller capsids, at 18-26 nm, but larger genomes, at 5 kb. It is important to consider other self replicating genetic elements, such as satelliviruses, viroids and ribozymes. The genome of "Nasuia deltocephalinicola", a symbiont of the European pest leafhopper, Macrosteles quadripunctulatus consists of a circular chromosome of 112,031 base pairs. "Nanoarchaeum equitans"'s genome is 490,885 nucleotides long. "Pelagibacter ubique" is one of the smallest known free-living bacterium