Air sampling was conducted in Szczecin (Poland) throughout April-September 2013. The final data set included 177 daily and 4248 hourly samples. The total of 21 types of spores, which occurred in a number >10 in the season, were taken into account. The following meteorological parameters were analyzed: air temperature, relative humidity, precipitation and wind speed. Effects of individual weathe...

Fission yeast possesses a family of (1,3)-alpha-glucan synthase-related genes; one of them, mok1/ags1, plays an essential function in morphogenesis during vegetative growth. In this work we show that three mok1 paralogs -mok12, mok13 and mok14 are required for sporulation to succeed, acting at different stages of the spore wall maturation process. Mutation of mok12 affected the efficiency of sp...

Association between arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) and bacteria has long been studied. However, the factors influencing their association in the natural environment is still unknown. This study aimed to isolate bacteria associated with spore walls of AMF and identify their potential characters for association. Spores collected from coastal reclamation land were differentiated based on their...

Spores of Bacillus subtilis possess a thick protein coat that consists of an electron-dense outer coat layer and a lamellalike inner coat layer. The spore coat has been shown to confer resistance to lysozyme and other sporicidal substances. In this study, spore coat-defective mutants of B. subtilis (containing the gerE36 and/or cotE::cat mutation) were used to study the relative contributions o...

The GerAA, -AB, and -AC proteins of the Bacillus subtilis spore are required for the germination response to L-alanine as the sole germinant. They are likely to encode the components of the germination apparatus that respond directly to this germinant, mediating the spore's response; multiple homologues of the gerA genes are found in every spore former so far examined. The gerA operon is expres...

Tuberculosis (TB) is the most deadly infectious disease in existence, and the only available vaccine, Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG), is almost a century old and poorly protective. The immunological complexity of TB, coupled with rising resistance to antimicrobial therapies, necessitates a pipeline of diverse novel vaccines. Here, we show that Bacillus subtilis spores can be coated with a fusio...

The ascospore wall of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae consists of inner layers of similar composition to the vegetative cell wall and outer layers made of spore-specific components that confer increased stress resistance on the spore. The primary constituents of the outer spore wall are chitosan, dityrosine, and a third component termed Chi that has been identified by spectrometry bu...

We sought to identify proteins in the Bacillus anthracis spore, conserved in other strains of the closely related Bacillus cereus group, that elicit an immune response in mammals. Two high throughput approaches were used. First, an in silico screening identified 200 conserved putative B. anthracis spore components. A total of 192 of those candidate genes were expressed and purified in vitro, 75...

Substantial variation was found among single-spore cultures established from a single population of the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus Scutellospora pellucida. A common environment experiment demonstrated that five single-spore cultures differed in their average spore shape (as measured by length:width ratios) and size (volume) with interisolate heritabilities of offspring mean values of 0.96 an...

389 Exposure and sensitization to allergens can promote development and exacerbation of allergic disease. Various indoor aller-gens, including dust mites, animal dander, and mold have been reported to associate with allergic disease. Fungal spores and particles are widely distributed in outdoor and indoor environments and exposure to fungi has been shown to induce allergic disease and exacerbat...