from Hacker News

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about E. Coli (2008)

by angrygoat on 8/12/24, 1:00 PM with 12 comments

  • by koeng on 8/15/24, 3:51 PM

    I use E.coli on a pretty daily basis for cloning. It's alright, and there is so much work that has gone into it as a chassis organism, but overall there are definitely better organisms out there if we just took the time to figure them out (Vibrio natriegens and Bacillus subtilis are two examples).

    We absolutely do not have a clear idea of how E.coli works. Hell, we don't even know how almost 1/3 of the genes work on JCVI-Syn3a works, a minimal genome we synthetically created. Far fewer in E.coli.

  • by pazimzadeh on 8/15/24, 3:40 PM

    The article touches on the versatility of E. coli, but doesn't explicitly mention the extreme diversity within what we call E. coli.

    Even just within the subset of E. coli which causes UTI's, 25-40% of the genome varied between strains. (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5653229/)

    This diversity wasn't really appreciated in 2008 when many E. coli genomes hadn't been sequenced yet.

  • by mncharity on 8/15/24, 10:04 PM