This is the name of a special type of cells with a rather dense shell. What are disputes? They can be present in several categories of organisms: bacteria, fungi, plants. Their functions are different. If in bacteria the formation of these cells serves as a way of protection from adverse environmental conditions, a method of preserving the species, then in plants and fungi it is also for reproduction. You will learn about what disputes are in biology, and about many other interesting things from our article.
Microorganisms
The word "spore" itself is of Greek origin, and it means "seed" or "sowing". What are spores in bacteria? These microscopic organisms, as the most ancient inhabitants on Earth, had to protect themselves as much as possible from all sorts of cataclysms that have occurred over all these times. And nature endowed them with an excellent margin of safety, which has no analogues. Bacteria can withstand nitrogen freezing, and can live in hot geysers where the water temperature reaches almost boiling. Some microbes live both in acidic lakes and in a hydrogen sulfide environment. They live high in the atmosphere, and deep in the soil, and under water, leaving bacterial spores everywhere. What does it mean? If the conditions for lifeunfavorable, the bacterium does not die, but forms a certain form of its existence, called a spore.
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Such a change, a new shaping of the body is usually caused by lack of nutrition, temperature changes, changes in humidity. This is, figuratively speaking, the "insurance" of the bacterium, and in this form it can be preserved, be insured against disappearance for many years. Different bacteria have spores that look different. For example, in hay sticks they are in the center and do not exceed the diameter of the microorganism. In others, they exceed the diameter and are located at the end of the cell. If the spore is inside a bacterium (and a microorganism can form only one), then it is an endospore. The microbe that creates such a spore is called a sporangium. But it also happens that the spore is covered with an additional protective shell, and the rest of the cell, as it were, dies off. In the new formation, the exchange process is suspended, there is practically no liquid there, and the matter is significantly reduced in volume, as if “dries out.”
What are fungal spores?
In the kingdom of mushrooms, which combine some features of both plants and animals, everything happens a little differently. Here, spores are formed mainly for the purpose of reproduction. What does "spores" mean in mycology (the science that studies fungi)? On earth there are, according to some scientists, more than a million species of mushrooms. They have become an integral part of terrestrial, underground and aquatic ecosystems. How are the mushroomsspread around the world at such a rapid rate?
And this happens thanks to spores intended by nature for reproduction. A fungal spore contains one or more microscopic cells. There are very few nutrients, the formation is a kind of concentrate. Spores are very light, so they "travel" with the help of wind and water, with the participation of other living organisms. Many of them die, while rare ones survive. Death is compensated by nature: the number of spores is huge. So, for example, champignons can form up to forty billion spores per hour! Once in sufficiently favorable conditions, the surviving spores germinate, give rise to a new mycelium of the fungus. There are formation data for asexual (mitospores) and sexual (meiospores) reproduction. Their functions are different. The first are intended for mass resettlement, an increase in numbers during the vegetative periods. And the second - rather, to improve the quality of reproduction.
In plants
What are spores in the kingdom of flora? All plants, in one form or another, can form spores. This process is called sporogenesis. However, it is customary to call spore plants those plants that technically spread and multiply using these forms. These are mainly algae, ferns, mosses, club mosses, horsetails. It is believed that in the evolutionary process (about 400 million years ago), higher plants originated from green algae, which reproduced by spores - rhinophytes. They are the progenitors of all higher spore and seed representatives of the fauna,existing in the modern world.
