Cell Septation during Synchronous Growth of Bacillus subtilis

Abstract

USING a fluorescent antibody technique, cell wall growth in Bacillus sp. has been shown to occur at specific areas of the cell surface, at the site of septum formation¹. Before cell separation, however, future division sites became evident. This multiseptate nature of Bacillus was used to account for the high dispersion in the generation time of individually observed cells grown in tryptic meat broth². Thus during growth in complex media, while the production of cell septa might have been in accord with the overall growth, the timing of cell separation was particularly variable. Here I report experiments on synchronously dividing cultures of Bacillus subtilis in which, during growth in a synthetic medium, both cell division and the production of multiseptate cells were ordered events in the cell cycle.