Non-involvement of Lysis during Sporulation of Bacillus Mycoides in Distilled Water* by Jerome

Powell and Hunter (1953) do not concur with the conclusions reached by this laboratory (Hardwick and Foster, 1952) that washed vegetative cells of aerobic bacilli can sporulate in the absence of exogenous nutrition and when growth is precluded. Their view is based essentially on the demonstration that under the conditions maintained in their experiments mass lysis of the cells initially present took place. They believe that the few survivors grow abundantly and sporulate on the lytic products, and imply that sporogenesis is intrinsically connected with increase in cell growth. In view of the erroneous impression the Powell and Hunter paper creates relative to claims based on our experiments, we present here a considerable amount of additional experimental data which, without exception, support and confirm our original findings, and which appear to preclude the occurrence of mass lysis in our experiments. Differences in results between the two laboratories are discussed later.