hi i wanted to make this quick video about the life cycle of chlamydias um i looked on youtube and the other ones i found were a lot more technical than you need to know so let's look at this first when they're inside of a host cell you see these red shapes these are called reticulate bodies and chlamydias only take this form when they're inside of a host cell when they're outside of a host cell they can't they can't live on their own so they grow inside a host sell for a while inside of an inclusion when they start to get full and overcrowded they turn into these dots it shows up as purple dots in the picture those are called elementary bodies and these are a dormant state so they don't have any active metabolism it's just like this little little tiny pellet and this is the form that spreads from cell to cell inside the host so after the host cell fills up with these hundreds and hundreds of those can come bursting out at one time and each individual one of those can spread to another host cell once the elementary body enters the host cell then it will grow back into the reticulate body and be a metabolically active normal living bacterial cell again this means two things this means they can spread very quickly inside the host because they release so many elementary bodies at a time it also means that chlamydias are hard for our immune system to kill they're the only group of bacteria that that have this life cycle no other bacteria do something like this and the chlamydias spend most of their time hiding inside of a host cell so it's hard for the immune system to find and kill them