Model Organism: Escherichia Coli, A Mutualist with Humans

Model organisms are a group of organisms that can be used to study and reveal certain biological phenomena with universal patterns in living organisms. E. coli is one of the classic model organisms.

E. coli is not a rare organism, but present in all of us, and it is an important normal flora in our intestinal tract, providing us with vitamin K2, which we cannot synthesize ourselves. However, it can also be bad sometimes-when our immunity is weakened, it can become a pathogen, potentially causing infections outside our intestinal tract, such as sepsis and urinary tract infections. On the other hand, there are some species of E. coli that are pathogenic and can cause gastroenteritis in humans, leading to abdominal pain, fever, diarrhea, etc.

In 1885, Theodor Escherich, a German-Austrian pediatrician, discovered the bacterium in the feces of healthy people, and because it was found in the colon, it is named Escherichia coli. at first, E. coli was considered as a common intestinal bacterium, but later American scientists Stanley Norman Cohen and Herbert Boyer applied E. coli to genetic engineering.

Cohen was working on bacterial plasmids, and Boyer was interested in a restriction endonuclease in E. coli that recognized specific nucleotide sequences and thus cut the nucleotide chain down the middle. In 1973, they published a paper summarizing their results, which announced the dawn of genetic engineering.

In addition to genetic engineering, E. coli has an irreplaceable role as a model organism in the study of bacterial physiology and behavior. The most commonly used strain in the laboratory is the K12 strain of E. coli, which has lost its ability to survive in the intestine compared to the normal wild-type E. coli strain, but is well suited for laboratory studies and propagation in laboratory environments. Using E. coli K12, American scientists Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum have discovered the unique bacterial conjugation, which provides a very good method for scientists to conduct research on molecular biology and microbial genetics, such as the exchange of genetic material between different strains of bacteria.

Finally, E. coli is also emerging as a potential player in bioenergy. For example, Hiroyasu Yamamoto et al. successfully genetically modified E. coli in 2011 to convert sugar from plants into hydrocarbons almost identical to conventional diesel, which they call "biodiesel"; Pauli Kallio and his team, similarly genetically modified E. coli in 2014 to produce propane, a clean energy source with a large market need.

There are many more studies on E. coli, and no one expected that this little guy, which was originally only in our intestines, has now been deeply integrated into both medical research and daily life and industrial production.

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