Why do sporangium burst when alcohol is added

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The asci pump themselves full of water by osmosis, eventually building up enough pressure to shoot spores out through their small openings and into the air.

Gibberella zeae, the new powerhouse spore launcher, is a fungal pathogen of wheat. Its spores are spindle-shaped and small enough that five of them would fit end to end across the cut tip of a human hair.

Eight spores are packed into a pod-shaped, fluid-filled capsule called an ascus, and hundreds of asci are, in turn, crammed into a pimplelike organ called a perithecium [see illustration right]. To begin the firing process, each ascus produces a high internal concentration of mannitol, a slightly sweet alcohol.

The mannitol draws water by osmosis out of the surrounding tissue and into the ascus, causing it to swell. As it swells, the ascus elongates, so that it points toward the small central opening in the perithecium.

And pressure is just what is needed to fire the spores from a pinprick-size pore in the ascus. But the ascus has a further osmotic trick to raise the pressure much higher: it pumps potassium and chloride ions from the outside to the inside, and the ions draw in yet more water. The pressure in the ascus rises as high as five atmospheres. Suddenly, the tip of the ascus bursts.

Spores and fluid spurt into the air over a distance of. The spent ascus retreats back down inside the perithecium and a newly bloated ascus comes up. A quarter inch may not seem very far, but it is more than enough to launch the lightweight spores into air currents that can carry them to a new home.

The force on the spores initially accelerates them at an astonishing , times the acceleration of gravity. They reach speeds of eighty miles an hour, or nearly 2 million spore lengths per second. The instant the spores are fired, however, they hit the air as if it were made of concrete. A spore leaving the perithecium travels nearly straight up at first. Then, its forward momentum spent, it drops nearly straight down. And the smaller the spores, the less their flight paths look like a parabola, and the more they resemble the path of a marble falling off a table.

Despite the temptations of superacceleration, though, it seems unlikely that the Department of Defense will go scurrying any time soon for ways to scale-up a spore launcher into a working gun. Bacterial membrane protein has similar structure to proteins that remodel and rebuild cell membranes in humans. Natural History Magazine. Departments Features Samplings Nature. Biomechanics: December Spore Launchers Ferns and fungi that explosively reproduce.

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