The swelling is a surprise to microbiologists, who have assumed that spores of the Bacillus bacteria, which include anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), are a dormant, resting and basically inert stage of the microbe.
The swelling, observed of spores of Bacillus thuringiensis, bacteria now often used to kill insects that attack crops, may be diagnostic of all Bacillus spores and may allow scientists to distinguish between different types of Bacillus.
"If we are able to discriminate between spores based on size or swelling characteristics, it's a test we could do in seconds to minutes," said Andrew J. Westphal, a research physicist at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory.
Westphal and UC Berkeley physics professor P. Buford Price, along with microbial biologists Terrance J. Leighton and Katherine E. Wheeler of the Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute, will report their findings next week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The article will be posted on the Web sometime during the week of Feb. 10.
On Jan. 22, the federal government began to deploy environmental monitors to detect airborne bioterrorism agents, including anthrax and smallpox. The system relies on filtering air and sending the filters to a lab, where any attached microbes would be cultured and identified. Even with advanced techniques such as PCR (polymerase chain reaction) to detect microbial genes, the turnaround time would be 12-24 hours.
A device to scan for Bacillus spores of a certain size and swelling time could provide an answer in about 10 minutes.
"This wouldn't be a foolproof way of saying, "You've got anthrax spores,'" added Price, "
Contact: Robert Sanders
University of California - Berkeley