Electron microscopy of thin sections of dormant and germinating spores of Bacillus subtilis 168 revealed a progressive change in the structure of the cortex, outer spore coat, and inner spore coat. The initial changes were observed in the cortex region, which showed a loose fibrous network within 10 min of germination, and in the outer spore coat, which began to be sloughed off. The permeabilit...

We report our experimental investigations on generation, propagation, and detection of very long-lived, multiple, coherent-acoustic-phonon (CAP) picosecond transients in high-quality, ultra-thin (~53 μm) GaN single-crystal platelets. Our measurements were performed using a femtosecond two-color pump-probe spectroscopy technique, with 100-fs-wide, ultraviolet laser pump pulses used to generate t...

BACKGROUND Clostridium difficile is the main cause of nosocomial infections including antibiotic associated diarrhea, pseudomembranous colitis and toxic megacolon. During the course of Clostridium difficile infections (CDI), C. difficile undergoes sporulation and releases spores to the colonic environment. The elevated relapse rates of CDI suggest that C. difficile spores has a mechanism(s) to ...

Submerged cultivation of Saccharopolyspora erythraea, at different initial spore concentrations, was carried out to study the inter-relationship between inoculum concentration, morphology, rheology and erythromycin production. Pellet morphology was dominant in runs at 10 and 10 spore/ml initial spore concentrations, whereas there was a significant presence of clump morphology in runs at initial...

Spore formation is a controlled process of differentiation which has been arbitrarily divided into seven stages: the axial chromatin stage, septation, engulfment of the spore protoplast, cortex formation, coat formation, maturation, and the free spore stage [P. C. Fitz-James, Colloq. Intern. Centre Natl. Rech. Sci. (Paris) 124: 529, 1965; P. Schaeffer et al., Colloq. Intern. Centre Natl. Rech. ...

The 5'terminal oligopyrimidine (5'TOP) motif is a cis-regulatory RNA element located immediately downstream of the 7-methylguanosine [m7G] cap of TOP mRNAs, which encode ribosomal proteins and translation factors. In eukaryotes, this motif coordinates the synchronous and stoichiometric expression of the protein components of the translation machinery. La-related protein 1 (LARP1) binds TOP mRNA...

At maturity, the spores of Dictyostelium are suspended in a viscous fluid droplet, with each spore being surrounded by its own spore coat. Certain glycoproteins characteristic of the spore coat are also dissolved in this fluid matrix after the spore coat is formed. To determine whether any proteins of the coat reside in this fluid phase earlier during the process of spore coat assembly, pairs o...

The four class A penicillin-binding proteins (PBPs) of Bacillus subtilis appear to play functionally redundant roles in polymerizing the peptidoglycan (PG) strands of the vegetative-cell and spore walls. The ywhE product was shown to bind penicillin, so the gene and gene product were renamed pbpG and PBP2d, respectively. Construction of mutant strains lacking multiple class A PBPs revealed that...