Actinomyces

Waksman wrote in his autobiography: " … It is the first attempt that has ever been made to grow an actinomyces on a large scale, to attempt to utilize an actinomyces for any practical purpose, or even to find any use whatsoever for this obscure group of micro-organisms." Unfortunately, the initial excitement did not last long: actinomycin certainly killed the pathogens, but it killed laboratory animals too. Woodruff pressed on …

Very often the actinomyces are mixed with some other microorganism, the growth of which is more vigorous, and tends to obscure the actinomyces.

He soon became expert enough to spot an actinomyces colony at a glance. For Albert Schatz, the quest for the wonder microbe in this chaos of nature owed more to intuition than any systematic scientific search. "If you ask me why I picked one colony of actinomyces over another, I cannot tell you. There was no rationale for picking one colony of an actinomyces over another. Naturally if a plate had five colonies which morphologically and grossly looked alike, I would not pick all five."

An sspAB double mutant was generated and the resulting effects were additive; however, it retained a single previously unrecognized lactose-inhibitable coaggregation with an actinomyces coaggregation group D representative (Figure 3.3, cognate symbol complementary to gray rectangle).