Robert,

I only have experience in dealing with bacterial spores of the Bacillus genus.  In that case, the term "spore" refers to the entire organism, including the endospore, spore cortex, and outer spore membrane.  As you say, the endospore houses the DNA and vast majority of the calcium-dipicolinic acid chelate.  If you use the term "spore," I therefore assuming that you're not limiting yourself to just the central part of the organism, and that you are including the outer protective layers as well.

Hope this helps!

Robert

I think the use of the term spores rather than endospores in articles is for convenience. For me the term endospores makes the distinction with fungal spores and reflects the 'wikipedia definition'. When an article focuses on bacillus or clostridia species then I would consider obvious that if the term spore is used, it refers to endospores. I have not looked at search engines to see if there is a difference in hits whether one uses the term endospore or spore. I would imagine that there would actually be fewer hits using the term endospore and just using the term endospore in the title, abstract and key words might lead to the research to be overlooked. In terms of optimisation of searches I would imagine that naming the bacterial species and the term spores would ensure an article to be picked up by search engine.

Dr. Maillard - Thank you for your response!  I do agree that convenience is probably part of the reason people use spore when talking endospores.  And I think you hit upon my concern that in searching for research papers using endospore as a search term, that many important and useful papers could be overlooked.  But searching for 'spore' would give massive amounts of unrelated papers and create a time and effort burden to find the important references needed.  So, in addition to using genus names, I would strongly prefer to having researchers use the term 'endospore' in the keywords (or title or abstract) at least once if they are actually presenting data on the endospores.  This would increase the likelihood of finding the papers, and hopefully allow researchers to build on the works of others, and improve the quality of the work.

Does the presence of endospore in all the cells causing lysis the cell mother ,and how get resistance when there is endospore within the vegetative cell

Alaa,  While I am not completely sure I understand your question I will address the two portions.  First, the bacterial mother cell has much of the cytoplasm and DNA become the spore interior and the spore coats are created.  Once the endospore is completed, what is left of the mother cell dies leaving only the 'free' spore.  Second, since the endospore is not metabolically active, any antibiotics present would not have any effect on the spore, but when the spore germinates it could be affected by any antibiotic still present.  If you meant instead the resistance (to heat, etc) of the endospore, that resistance only occurs after the endospore is formed and the mother cell is dying or dead and thus there is no longer a vegetative cell.