Individuality, phenotypic differentiation, dormancy and ‘persistence’ in culturable bacterial systems: commonalities shared by environmental, laboratory, and clinical microbiology

Abstract excerpt

For bacteria, replication mainly involves growth by binary fission. However, in a very great many natural environments there are examples of phenotypically dormant, non-growing cells that do not replicate immediately and that are phenotypically 'nonculturable' on media that normally admit their growth. They thereby evade detection by conventional culture-based methods. Such dormant cells may also be observed in...