ABSTRACT
It is also a good example of man’s understanding of his world. We know more about the tiny, rod-shaped E. coli than we do about any other living organism, even humans. (Note: there are hundreds of strains of E. coli that live symbiotically in our gut, although one strain gets most of the press: E. coli O157:H7, an uncommon strain that can make us sick if we eat an infected raw hamburger or bad bag of spinach, for example.) We sequenced E. coli’s genome-all 4,639,221 nucleotide pairs-by 1997. We did not know our own genome until 2003. E. coli is considered a model organism because so much of how it operates is universal. Everything we learn about it sheds light on other aspects of biology. Most of what we know about the basic workings of life itself, such as how DNA works and how proteins get put together, we know from studying E. coli.
