Bacteriophages have been suggested as an alternative approach to reduce the amount of pathogens in various applications. Bacteriophages of various specificity and virulence were isolated as a means of controlling food-borne pathogens. We studied the interaction of bacteriophages with Bacillus species, which are very often persistent in industrial applications such as food production due to thei...

A relatively small but consistent increase in the frequency of spore formation by an oligosporogenous strain of Bacillus popilliae (NRRL B-2309M) was obtained by adding 0.1% sodium pyruvate to the sporulation medium. The frequency of spore formation was essentially the same when a low level of glucose, trehalose, or glucose-6-phosphate or a high level of alpha-methyl-d-mannoside was added as th...

Germinating spores, germ-tubes (promycelia), gall tissue and spores developing in the gall were examined. No synaptonemal complexes (SCs) were found in any of these cell types. There are 3 possible explanations for this: (1) Ustilago maydis does not have SCs. This is the case in Schizosaccharomyces pombe (Olson, Eden, Egel-Mitani & Egel, 1978) and in many strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae (e....

Autophagy-related proteins play significantly different roles in eukaryotes. In the entomopathogenic fungus Beauveria bassiana, autophagy is associated with fungal growth and development. BbATG1 (a serine/threonine protein kinase) and BbATG8 (a ubiquitin-like protein) have similar roles in autophagy, but different roles in other processes. Disruption mutants of BbATG1 and BbATG8 had impaired co...

The cultivation of grasslands can modify both bacterial community structure and impact on nutrient cycling as well as the productivity and diversity of plant communities. In this study, two pristine New Zealand grassland sites dominated by indigenous tall tussocks (Chionochloa pallens or C. teretifolia) were examined to investigate the extent and predictability of variation of the bacterial com...

Alternaria alternata is a filamentous fungus that causes considerable loss of crops of economically important feed and food worldwide. It produces more than 60 different secondary metabolites, among which alternariol (AOH) and altertoxin (ATX) are the most important mycotoxins. We found that mycotoxin production and spore formation are regulated by light in opposite ways. Whereas spore formatio...

Poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) is a natural polymer synthesized by many bacteria as a carbon-energy storage material. It was accumulated maximally prior to the spore formation but was degraded during the process of sporulation in Bacillus thuringiensis. Intriguingly, B. thuringiensis also accumulates large amounts of insecticidal crystal proteins (ICPs) during sporulation, which requires consider...

Spore formation in Bacillus subtilis relies on a regulated intramembrane proteolysis (RIP) pathway that synchronizes mother-cell and forespore development. To address the molecular basis of this SpoIV transmembrane signaling, we carried out a structure-function analysis of the activating protease CtpB. Crystal structures reflecting distinct functional states show that CtpB constitutes a ring-li...

Spore formation in the Gram-positive bacterium Bacillus subtilis has been classically viewed as an example of unicellular differentiation that occurs in response to nutritional starvation. We present evidence that B. subtilis produces an extracellular factor(s) that is required, in addition to starvation conditions, for efficient sporulation. This factor is secreted and accumulates in a cell de...

Multicellular organisms utilize cell-to-cell signals to build patterns of cell types within embryos, but the ability of fungi to form organized communities has been largely unexplored. Here we report that colonies of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae formed sharply divided layers of sporulating and nonsporulating cells. Sporulation initiated in the colony's interior, and this region expanded u...