 Dr. O'Neill here. We're going to talk about spores here a little bit. So here you see on the screen I have a comparison of vegetative cells which are living, metabolically active, reproducing cells, and endospores or spores, which are, I like to put it as they're basically, they're living but they've been paused. They're not growing. They don't have a metabolic activity. So let's talk about why an organism would form spores first. When you put some organisms in a very hostile environment, they're able to basically pause their life until things improve. So the type of organisms that can form spores or spore formers are from the genus bacillus, which can lead to things like anthrax and food poisoning or the genus claustridium, which can lead to tetanus and botulism and C. diff and other types of food poisoning and gangrene. So obviously very, very scary organisms. And that's because if you put most organisms in a harsh environment, they will die. If you put spore forming organisms in a harsh environment where it's too warm, they're running out of food, whatever it might be, they will just wall themselves off of spores and wait you out. So as you can see here, the key here is that spores are resistant to lots and lots of things. So if you put them in a hostile environment, they're just going to wait you out. I won't go into the ground. I already covered spore staining. They don't have a metabolism. They've removed almost all their water. They're not growing. They are just waiting for the environment to improve. They're waiting for a signal. Now we can force those signals like heat. Heat is the real high heat is the best way to force spores to germinate so we can kill them. That's why we use really high heat when we're canning our food and in the laboratory why we use the autoclave because it can wake up these spores and kill them. So let's go ahead and look at the spore elation process. This process would take a few hours. So you put one of those two types of organisms, the clostridium or the bacillus, in a situation where they're not going to survive instead of making a second copy of themselves like they would in binary fission, they will make a spore copy of themselves. So this is not a type of reproduction because you see you start with one vegetative cell, you end with one spore. There's no reproduction here. Other types of organisms like fungi and stuff, they actually have spores budding off of them to reproduce but that's a whole different kind of spore. So let's look at the spore elation process and then we'll talk about why it matters again a little bit. So the organism makes a copy of its DNA just like it would if it was dividing. A membrane forms around that DNA so it's almost like a second cell is forming but it's inside the first cell. Then you have the four spore and then you have the cortex forming around it and then the endospore, step five is the key there, layers and layers of protein. This protein is designed to resist radiation, to resist heat, to resist all manner of things. So it's the fact that it has a big, thick protein coat around it and it's dehydrated, those are the two things that shut off its metabolism but also protect it from the environment. And then out shoots a spore. So that's the spore elation process and I already mentioned it can take several hours. So the spore is not an entire cell. The spore only has in it the ingredients needed to wake back up and resume metabolic activity. There's DNA in it, a little bit of RNA, handful of enzymes, couple small molecules and that's it. It's only enough to turn the machinery back on to create a living vegetative cell again when the environment would improve. So the opposites and now we made our spore and then how long they can hang out as spores before they germinate is up for debate. We know it's a very long time. So germination is the process of this spore regenerating into a living vegetative cell. So we know that they have been able to germinate spores that are thousands of years old from 3000 to 7500 years old for sure. But there have been multiple reports where people have said they've been able to germinate spores that are millions of years old from two and a half million years old to 20, 30, maybe even 40 million years old. We don't know but we know it's for a very, very long time. So why does this matter? Why is this clinically significant? I would say the main thing is with C. diff is a great example. You have no idea how many of your patients are actually already infected with C. diff. They have clostridium difficile, organisms living inside of them. But most of them are walled off as spores because the environment is pretty hostile to them. There's lots of other organisms that are using up food and keeping the pH low, like these types of things if you have a healthy gut. But this is why almost every person that develops C. diff infection is going to, it's going to happen after antibiotics. Antibiotics wipe out the competition. The spores now realize now is a good time to regenerate and become vegetative cells and someone gets a C. diff infection. So C. diff infections are very, very important. They kill lots of people in the United States and everywhere else. So that's probably my quote unquote favorite example of concerns about spores. If the other big place to be concerned about spores is with canning. You can can your food properly, but if you're not killing the spores, then there can be some issues there. Now most of the spores that are going to be in canned goods that survive the proper canning process are not going to cause foodborne illness. But this is why you have to take canning very, very seriously. Okay, so that should be everything you know about spores. Spore formation and germination, their regeneration. Have a wonderful day, be blessed.