Clostridium difficile remains a leading nosocomial pathogen, putting considerable strain on the healthcare system. The ability to form endospores, highly resistant to environmental insults, is key to its persistence and transmission. However, important differences exist between the sporulation pathways of C. difficile and the model Gram-positive organism Bacillus subtilis. Amongst the challenge...

ssgB was identified as a novel early sporulation gene in Streptomyces coelicolor. An ssgB deletion mutant failed to sporulate, over-produced actinorhodin, and its colonies were significantly larger than those of the parental strain, suggesting an important role for the ssgB gene product in the process of growth cessation prior to sporulation-specific cell division. This places ssgB temporally b...

We used microarrays to identify the causes of sporulation deficiencies in Bacillus subtilis after 6,000 generations of evolution. We found that sporulation loss did not result from large-scale deletions; therefore, it must have resulted from smaller indels and/or substitutions. Transcription patterns of one strain versus its ancestor showed that sporulation was not initiated and suggested that ...

In the course of study on ribonucleic acid (RNA) metabolism during sporulation in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, a new species of RNA (20S) was observed in sporulating cells by polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. The relative content of this RNA to total RNA increased linearly early in sporulation. Labeled adenine was preferentially incorporated into 20S RNA during the early stages of sporulation. T...

The pseudotemperate phage PMB12 was isolated from soil on the basis of its ability to enhance the rate of sporulation of Bacillus subtilis 168. PMB12 was subsequently shown to convert the sporulation defect in two genetically distinct classes of sporulation mutants. One class includes those rifampin-resistant mutants that are also spore-negative (mutated at the rif locus). The other class inclu...

Five different sporulation medium such as tryptone yeast extract (TYE) broth, tryptone glucose yeast extract (TGYE) broth, minimal media, Sucrose salt medium, Arret & Krishbaum (AK)sporulation agar were screened for spore production in Bacillus megaterium ATCC 9885. During this study, it was observed that out of different combinations of tryptone, yeast extract and dextrose sporulation was maxi...

Yeast cells enter and undergo gametogenesis relatively asynchronously, making it technically challenging to perform stage-specific genomic and biochemical analyses. Cell-to-cell variation in the expression of the master regulator of entry into sporulation IME1, has been implicated to be the underlying cause of asynchronous sporulation. Here we find that timing of IME1 expression is of critical ...

We have quantitatively monitored the sporulation and germination efficiencies of approximately 4,200 yeast deletion strains in parallel by using a molecular bar coding strategy. In a single study, we doubled the number of genes functionally implicated in sporulation to approximately 400, identifying both positive and negative regulators. Our set of 261 sporulation-deficient genes illustrates th...

Filtration of late log-phase cultures of Bacillus megaterium ATCC 19213 grown on defined sucrose salts medium (SS) or SS plus glutamate medium (SSG) through nine layers of Whatman no. 40 filter paper in a fritted-glass disc Büchner funnel resulted in filtrates containing cells which showed synchronous growth and proceeded to sporulation. SS cells completed one synchronous division after filtrat...

In the course of concerted efforts to produce large crops of spores of the Clostridium species known as putrefactive anaerobe (PA) 3679, a sporogenic property of the culture filtrates of the organism was observed. Sporulation induced by culture filtrates was considered to be of sufficient fundamental importance to justify further investigation. This is a preliminary report of a study of the spo...