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<div>Originally Posted by <strong>mamakay</strong> <a href="/community/forum/post/10372889"><img alt="View Post" class="inlineimg" src="/community/img/forum/go_quote.gif" style="border:0px solid;"></a></div>
<div style="font-style:italic;">Well, it looks like we're on our own guessing what's going on here. Which is quite surprising, really. I figured the life cycle of this famous bacteria would be a subject about which a great deal was known. Oh, well.</div>
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Humans tend to be self-centered by nature, so it's no big surprise if interest in a microbe like <i>C. tetani</i> begins with the effects of its toxin on the human body and how to prevent and treat that. Once enough is known about it to provide adequate means of dealing with it, it's also no big surprise if much of the interest ends there, and most of the research moves off in the direction of the next pesky critter that's giving us grief. You'd think that would still leave at least a few individuals of the obsessive biogeek variety who'd be motivated to keep digging if only in the hope of achieving some of the glory that goes along with uncovering something nobody's ever uncovered before, no matter how useless. Maybe even a <i>very</i> few who'd do it just for fun. So many bugs, so little grant money.<br><br><div style="margin:20px;margin-top:5px;">
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<table border="0" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="0" width="99%"><tr><td class="alt2" style="border:1px inset;">I've read a bunch of things that said "Tetanus can be found living in the soil, especially heavily manured soil." Assuming the "especially" part is based on lots of good data, I'm going to guess that tetanus has probably adapted to surviving by moving from the guts of animals, to the soil, back into the gut, etc. Just a guess, though.</td>
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It probably more or less comes down to: "what does the sucker <i>eat</i>?" -- and I'm going to guess the answer is: "like its close cousin, <i>C. botulinim</i>, pretty much anything organic, in various stages of decomposition, and if it's rich in iron, so much the better, because the iron removes oxygen by binding it in rust". One thing you see over and over is "The toxin has no known useful function to C. tetani", which doesn't mean it doesn't have a function, just that we don't know what it is. If I wanted to get creeped out, I'd think about possible useful functions some humans might find for such highly toxic substances as those produced by these organisms, because culturing them doesn't look like very tricky work. I don't know about purifying them. Just googling that probably earns ya a special spot in some FBI database.