Inspired by a very boring train stoppage last year, I am going to add, one a day, to this of great / interesting genomes until christmas day.
On the first day of christmas, my true love sent to me:
Escherichia coli and its associated phages. This humble bacterium is one of our commensal organisms; it hangs out in our gut being, usually, useful to us. But the reason why every molecular biologists knows about this critter is that it is also the bedrock of DNA manipulation. Molecular biologists shuttle DNA from all sorts of different organisms through E. coli constantly. It is the assembly line for much of molecular biology – where you capture, grow up, extract DNA. The smell of the growth media to grow E. coli infuses all molecular biology labs. E. coli has its own parasites – phages – which are viruses that infect E.coli, and these are as useful as their bacterial host.
Continue reading “The First Genome of Christmas: E. coli (and friends)”