30 Facts About Escherichia coli

Escherichia coli, known as E coli, is a Gram-negative, facultative anaerobic, rod-shaped, coliform bacterium of the genus Escherichia that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms.

The well-used example of this with E coli involves the growth of the bacterium on glucose and lactose, where E coli will consume glucose before lactose.

Escherichia coli and related bacteria possess the ability to transfer DNA via bacterial conjugation or transduction, which allows genetic material to spread horizontally through an existing population.

The process of transduction, which uses the bacterial virus called a bacteriophage, is where the spread of the gene encoding for the Shiga toxin from the Shigella bacteria to E coli helped produce E coli O157:H7, the Shiga toxin-producing strain of E coli.

Escherichia coli encompasses an enormous population of bacteria that exhibit a very high degree of both genetic and phenotypic diversity.

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Genome sequencing of many isolates of E coli and related bacteria shows that a taxonomic reclassification would be desirable.

Different strains of E coli are often host-specific, making it possible to determine the source of fecal contamination in environmental samples.

For example, knowing which E coli strains are present in a water sample allows researchers to make assumptions about whether the contamination originated from a human, another mammal, or a bird.

For instance, E coli typically do not have the ability to grow aerobically with citrate as a carbon source, which is used as a diagnostic criterion with which to differentiate E coli from other, closely, related bacteria such as Salmonella.

Considered, it has been seen that E coli is the prey of multiple generalist predators, such as Myxococcus xanthus.

All commonly used research strains of E coli belong to group A and are derived mainly from Clifton's K-12 strain and to a lesser degree from d'Herelle's Bacillus coli strain .

Genes in E coli are usually named in accordance with the uniform nomenclature proposed by Demerec et al.

Genome sequence of E coli predicts 4288 protein-coding genes, of which 38 percent initially had no attributed function.

Interactome of E coli has been studied by affinity purification and mass spectrometry and by analyzing the binary interactions among its proteins.

Uropathogenic E coli is one of the main causes of urinary tract infections.

The outbreak started when several people in Germany were infected with enterohemorrhagic E coli bacteria, leading to hemolytic-uremic syndrome, a medical emergency that requires urgent treatment.

Carbapenem-resistant E coli that are resistant to the carbapenem class of antibiotics, considered the drugs of last resort for such infections.

An oral ETEC vaccine candidate consisting of rCTB and formalin inactivated E coli bacteria expressing major CFs has been shown in clinical trials to be safe, immunogenic, and effective against severe diarrhoea in American travelers but not against ETEC diarrhoea in young children in Egypt.

Many proteins previously thought difficult or impossible to be expressed in E coli in folded form have been successfully expressed in E coli.

Strain OP50 of Escherichia coli is used for maintenance of Caenorhabditis elegans cultures.

Escherichia coli is frequently used as a model organism in microbiology studies.

On such synthetic ecosystems, evolutionary experiments with E coli have been performed to study the spatial biophysics of adaptation in an island biogeography on-chip.

In other studies, non-pathogenic E coli has been used as a model microorganism towards understanding the effects of simulated microgravity on the same.

Studies are being performed attempting to program E coli to solve complicated mathematics problems, such as the Hamiltonian path problem.

In July 2017, separate experiments with E coli published on Nature showed the potential of using living cells for computing tasks and storing information.

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In 2021, a team led by biophysicist Sangram Bagh realized a study with E coli to solve 2 × 2 maze problems to probe the principle for distributed computing among cells.

Escherichia coli called it Bacterium coli commune because it is found in the colon.

Bacterium Escherichia coli was the type species of the now invalid genus Bacterium when it was revealed that the former type species was missing.

Escherichia coli has several practical uses besides its use as a vector for genetic experiments and processes.

For example, E coli can be used to generate synthetic propane and recombinant human growth hormone.