akinete

traitmech:000185 · CLASS · PROPOSED

A morphology trait in which a filamentous cyanobacterium differentiates enlarged, thick-coated, spore-like dormant cells called akinetes that can germinate into vegetative cells.

Trait evidence (3)

DOI:10.1159/000517443
Some cyanobacteria of the order Nostocales can form akinetes, spore-like dormant cells resistant to various unfavorable environmental fluctuations.

Garg and Maldener support akinetes as spore-like dormant cells formed by Nostocales cyanobacteria under unfavorable environmental conditions.
DOI:10.1159/000517443
Akinetes are enveloped in a thick protective coat containing a multilayered structure and are able to germinate into new vegetative cells under suitable growth conditions.

The source supports the thick protective coat and vegetative-cell germination clauses in the local definition.
DOI:10.3389/fmicb.2025.1677844
Raphidiopsis raciborskii (Nostocales) is a successful invader of temperate ecosystems originating from the tropics that forms akinetes in their new habitats to overcome unfavorable winter conditions.

Rios-Henriquez and Weithoff provide a second Nostocales cyanobacterium study supporting akinete formation as an unfavorable-condition dormancy trait.

Provenance

Identifier source: TraitMech local identifier
Definition source: DOI:10.1159/000517443

Parent traits (1)

phenotype METPO:1000059

kg-microbe context

No kg-microbe node embedding matched this record in the 2026-04-25 deepwalk.

Canonical examples (1)

Organisms cited as exemplars of this trait. Taxon ids are NCBITaxon and link out to the NCBI record.

Trichormus variabilis ATCC 29413 NCBITaxon:240292 DOI:10.1159/000517443 Model Nostocales strain still cited in the akinete literature as Anabaena variabilis ATCC 29413; the NCBI Taxonomy record lists that name as an equivalent name.

Discussions and Knowledge Gaps (1)

Open questions attached to this trait. Seeded by just knowledge-gap-scan and curated; see the corpus-wide index.

Resolve exact external ontology xrefs for the cyanobacterial akinete morphology trait.

CURATION TODO OPEN akinete-exact-xref-gap · raised by codex · 2026-09-14

Not yet attached to a section of this record — a curator sets attaches_to (e.g. causal_graphs#some_edge) so the gap shows beside the mechanism it concerns.

The pinned METPO snapshot contains only deprecated akinete classes, including METPO:1000012 obsolete akinete; no active METPO, GO, or OBO class was accepted as an exact equivalent for this cyanobacterial dormant-cell trait.

Curation history

2026-09-14T15:47:55Z · MINTED_TRAITMECH_ID · codex
Minted akinete as a DOI-backed TraitRecord after a repository-wide duplicate review covering ignored and hidden files; live METPO has no active exact akinete class and the placeholder is reserved in proposals/metpo_traitmech_v62.