fruiting body morphology is important for spore recovery after exposure to environmental stress.

Environmental microorganisms have evolved a variety of strategies to survive fluctuations in environmental conditions, including the production of biofilms and differentiation into spores. are ubiquitous soil bacteria that produce starvation-induced multicellular fruiting bodies filled with environmentally resistant spores (a specialized biofilm). Isolated spores have been shown to be more resistant than vegetative cells to heat, ultraviolet radiation, and desiccation.

Orphan Hybrid Histidine Protein Kinase SinK Acts as a Signal Integrator To Fine-Tune Multicellular Behavior in .

His-Asp phosphorelay (also known as two-component signal transduction) proteins are the predominant mechanism used in most bacteria to control behavior in response to changing environmental conditions. In addition to systems consisting of a simple two-component system utilizing an isolated histidine kinase/response regulator pair, some bacteria are enriched in histidine kinases that serve as signal integration proteins; these kinases are usually characterized by noncanonical domain architecture, and the responses that they regulate may be difficult to identify. The environmental bacterium is highly enriched in these noncanonical histidine kinases.