Erratum: Life without a wall or division machine in Bacillus subtilis

Nature 457, 849–853 (2009) It has been drawn to our attention that proliferation by a ‘budding’ process, similar to the one we described, has been reported many years ago for pleuropneumonia-like organisms and L-form bacteria 1,2 . The implication that this mode of replication is common to a wide range of bacteria supports the idea that ‘extrusion-resolution’ is representative of an ancient mode of proliferation invented before the divergence of the main groups of modern bacteria.