A Test for Sexual Fusion in Bacteria

CONTENT ALERTS Receive: RSS Feeds, eTOCs, free email alerts (when new articles cite this article), more» Information about commercial reprint orders: http://jb.asm.org/site/misc/reprints.xhtml To subscribe to to another ASM Journal go to: http://journals.asm.org/site/subscriptions/ JOHN W. GOWEN Aw RALPH E. LINCOLN Iowa State College, Ames, Iowa Received for publication April 2, 1942 The question-do bacterial species have a sexual stage with consequent reduction, segregation and recombination of their inheritance?-is fundamental to an understanding of pathogenicity, of virulence changes, or any other genetic . If bacteria have sexual stages, rapid segregation and recombination of any heterozygous inheritance into new would be possible. If reproduction is strictly asexual then inherited is limited to the less frequent process of mutation or possibly somatic segregation. A critical technique to throw light on this question is urgently needed. Character differences within a bacterial species furnish the necessary material for such a test. These characteristics may be vs. colony color, rough vs. smooth colony type, cataphoric movement to + or - poles, or any other character pairs for which it is possible to establish strains giving consistently the same progeny types. Two types, i.e., and colony color, are carried in separate pedigree cultures in sufficient serial platings to demonstrate that these types will give nothing but colonies on the one hand or colonies on the other. The two types are seeded into the same sterile broth tube or inoculated into a suitable host to give opportunity for sexual fusion to occur between bacteria of the two types. At...