ABSTRACT
In any encyclopedia concerning industrial applications of microorganisms, Escherichia coli will be included. Although few people would disagree on the importance of the organism today, it is a highly legitimate question to ask why a bacterium originally isolated from human intestines has become an important production host for as diverse products as precursors for plastics and therapeutic proteins? It has been stated [1] that if you “mention E. coli to the man in the street, he’s most likely to make some references to a dodgy burger and the resulting diarrhea.” However, even if there are pathogenic strains, E. coli is actually one of the dominating species in the bowel of healthy individuals. Furthermore, to most applied scientists E. coli is looked upon as a well-known and useful microbial model system. An important reason is that E. coli early became known for its ease of growth on synthetic media, and its fast doubling times [2], making it an attractive system to handle. e development leading to the current importance of E. coli is the result of many factors, some of which are summarized in Figure 21.1. Starting from the beginning, E. coli was rst cultured from faeces of healthy individuals in 1885 by the German pediatrician eodor Escherich. At that time he named the newly isolated organism “Bacterium coli” [3], to reect the fact that it was a bacterium present in the colon (hence the name “coli”), but it was later renamed Escherichia coli [2,4].
