What is it about?
Many organisms survive harsh environments by switching into special survival modes. Some bacteria do this by forming spores—dormant, highly resilient cells that can persist for years or even centuries. But making a spore is not simple: it requires coordinated activity across hundreds of genes and cellular processes, all at a time when the cell is already running out of energy. In this study, we asked a basic but unanswered question: how much energy does it actually take to make and revive a bacterial spore? By combining genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic data, we calculated the full energy cost of the sporulation life cycle in terms of ATP, the cell’s energy currency. We show that sporulation is one of the most energy-intensive processes a bacterium can perform, rivaling major cellular functions like growth and division. Our work provides a quantitative framework for understanding sporulation as an energetic investment rather than just a genetic program.
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Photo by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases on Unsplash
Why is it important?
This work reveals a fundamental trade-off at the heart of microbial survival: sporulation is extremely costly in the short term, but can pay off over long periods of environmental stress. By putting real numbers on this cost, we show when sporulation is favored—and when alternative survival strategies make more sense. Our results help explain why sporulation, despite being ancient and powerful, has been repeatedly lost in many bacterial lineages over evolutionary time. More broadly, this study demonstrates how energetic constraints can shape the evolution of complex traits, even when those traits provide clear survival advantages. Understanding these trade-offs is important not only for evolutionary biology, but also for fields like ecology, biotechnology, and medicine, where bacterial persistence plays a key role.
Perspectives
This project grew out of a desire to connect ideas that are often studied separately. Understanding sporulation required us to bring together questions about dormancy, quantitative energy costs, genetics, and the developmental biology of a well-studied model organism, Bacillus. The most rewarding part was seeing how these different perspectives could be combined to explain not just how sporulation works, but why such an ancient and widespread trait has been maintained—or lost—over evolutionary time.
Jay Lennon
Indiana University Bloomington
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Evolutionary bioenergetics of sporulation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2524274123.
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