Preliminary Notes on the Spore-formation 

 of the so-called " Soya-kahmhefe. " 



By 

 K. Saito. 



In my course of the recent microbiological studies on the 

 brewing of Japanese Soja-Sauce, I have found that the film- 

 yeast, which I described before as "Soya-kahmhefe" 11 , has 

 spore-formation preceded by an act of conjugation. 



For obtaining a plentiful supply of spores, I adopted the 

 method lately proposed by Miss Gorodokowa 2) , which gave 

 very successful result. On the streak-surface of agar-agar 

 medium used, cells containing spores were to be found in 

 abundance. Spore-containing cells are joined together in pairs 

 by a neck, through which the cavities of the two cells are con- 

 tinuous. The number of spores and their arrangement in these 

 paired compound cells is to be seen from the figure 3c, Plate II, 

 attached to my previous paper. 



To observe the process of conjugation, vigorous cells grow- 

 ing on the streak-surface of the above mentioned medium, 

 which were just beginning to put out tubes of conjugation, 

 were transferred to a hanging drop of distilled water ; and the 

 subsequent stages of development of the compound cells and of 

 the spores were traced under the microscope. The behaviours 

 of the conjugating cells were quite the same with those known 

 of the yeasts belonging to the genus Zygosaccharomyces. As 

 this species is new to science, I propose the name Zygosac- 

 charomyces japonicus. 



The details of the spore-formation of this interesting film- 

 yeast will be given later in another place. 



i) Centralbl. f. Bakt., Abt. II, Bd. XVII, No. 1-2, p. 20. 



2) Bull. Jard. Imp. Bot. St.-Petersbourg, VIII, liv. 5-G, p. lu'J. 



