Even as “living rocks,” spores still manage to keep track of their surroundings — if they don’t, they could die.
“They appear to have literally no measurable biological activity,” says Gürol Süel, a microbiologist at the University of California, San Diego. But Süel and his colleagues knew that spores’ cores contain positively charged potassium atoms, and because these atoms can move around without the cell using energy, the team suspected that potassium could be involved in shocking the cells awake.
Changes in the electrical charge of a cell are important across the tree of life, from determining when brain cells zip off messages to each other, to the . Finding that spores also use electrical charges to set their wake-up calls excites Süel. “You want to find principles in biology,” he says, “processes that cross systems, that cross fields and boundaries.”
Spores are not only interesting for their unique and extreme biology, but also for practical applications. Some “can cause some rather nasty things” from food poisoning to anthrax, says Setlow, who was not involved in the study. Since spores are resistant to most antibiotics, understanding germination could lead to a way to bring them back to life in order to kill them for good.
Still, there are many unanswered questions about the “black box” of how spores start germination, like whether it’s possible for the spores to “reset” their potassium count. “We really are in the beginnings of trying to fill in that black box,” says Kaito Kikuchi, a biologist now at Reveal Biosciences in San Diego who conducted the work while at University of California, San Diego. But discovering how spores manage to track their environment while more dead than alive is an exciting start.
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