Here’s a spooky conundrum: Is a spore alive or dead?
Gürol Süel, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, wouldn’t blame you if you voted for dead: “There’s nothing to detect: no heartbeat, no gene expression. There’s nothing going on,” he says.
But a spore might actually just be dormant—in a deep state of suspended animation meant to outlast inhospitable conditions that can persist for millions of years, until the day the spore “wakes up,” zombie-like, ready to grow. For years, the questions of how spores know when to reanimate, and how they actually do it, have been open ones. A new paper in Science by Süel’s group has
→ Continue reading at Wired - Science