E. coli is, arguably, the one species that scientists know best. If you type the name "Escherichia coli" into PubMed, the database of the National Library of Medicine, you'll get over a quarter of a million titles of scientific papers. Scientists have sequenced about 30 genomes of different strains of E. coli. It's the microbe of choice for those who want to figure out how to tinker with life. There's one problem with all this attention--how are scientists supposed to make sense of all this data? Scientists have created sites to aggregate E. coli data in one place. The newest and broadest site is now up: E. coli Hub. To put the site in historical context, the scientists who set it up asked me to write an essay. It's now online here.
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Escherichia coli is a superstar of the microbe world. Like Zelig, E.
Here are some O104:H4 links. The E.coli O104:H4 Genome Analysis Crowdsourcing wiki is also a good source of the latest scientific information. Anyway, links:
One of the lesser known microbiology facts is that the pathogen Shigella is actually E. coli. Since I'll be writing more about this cool bug soon, from the archives, here's an explanation (with a little modification).
If you're just tuning in, on Tuesday I offered five free signed copies of my new book
Great web site! Thanks for pointing that out. I'm halfway thru Microcosm; it might be your best book yet ;) I'm thinking of making it required reading for Microbiology 201.
Thanks for sharing... I'll definitely be using this.
Just finished your latest article in Scientific American. Very clear. Thank you.