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The colony structure and life cycle of the grampositive, soil‐dwelling bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor provide a fascinating exception to the view of bacteria as simple unicellular microorganisms. Mutations in genes involved in morphogenesis alter colony appearance but do not usually compromise viability. The majority of genes identified as being important for aerial hypha formation encode regulatory proteins; however, recent work has resulted in the characterization of two classes of structural molecules that are necessary for aerial development: the SapB surfactant peptide (specified by the ram gene cluster) and eight chaplin proteins (ChpA through H). It has been found that while Streptomyces has many of the conventional genes that are necessary for these processes to occur, Streptomyces cells are organized very differently from other bacteria and these differences are highly relevant to colony …