Microbe exhibits out-of-body activity
From Seattle, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Annual Meeting
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Scientists studying infectious microorganisms have tended to focus on human and veterinary diseases. But now microbiologists are finding that such microbes may have compelling lives on their own.
Consider anthrax, which is naturally present in soil and can reproduce rapidly after a cow, sheep, deer, or bison—and occasionally someone who works with these animals—takes up spores. “According to current dogma, the anthrax spore is totally dormant when outside of a person or animal,” says Philip C. Hanna of the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor. But Hanna now reports evidence suggesting that the bacterium can also undergo its entire life cycle in soil.