It was back in 1857, when
Escherich identified Escherichia coli, a rod shaped bacteria in baby’s
poop which was causing severe diarrhoea. Now fast forward to 150years from
then, E. coli now a modern workhouse for researchers from most
biological background. E. coli was found to be growing well in broths,
plates of agar and even in medium with reduced nutrition. Then when DNA was
discovered, modern biologists now manipulate and play with genetic engineering.
But a new paper published from Harvard found a better alternative and a
contender to race against E. coli. A preprint of the paper, which has
not been peer-reviewed, appeared on the bioRxiv repository this month.
The bacterium is named Vibrio
natriegens isolated from mud of a salt marsh can grow faster than E.
coli. It would save half of time genetics spend in labs to grow them. E.
coli normally known to double in 20mins, but V. natriegens takes
half a time to complete, i.e. 10mins.
“Over the course of a
hundred years of intense study, we have a huge amount of information about the
organism, more than any other on Earth,” says Adam Arkin, a biologist at the
University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the study.
For the past four
years, Henry Lee a postdoctoral researcher who was working on this bacterium
was reading all the past articles about how E. coli became a model
organism in molecular biology field. During transformation with E. coli take
up plasmid and differentiate it with colourful colonies. Similarly Lee was
working on the plasmid construct and successfully made transformation working. “He
proved he has a toehold on most of the genetics, which give us all faith he’ll
get it working pretty well,” says Arkin.
Arkin says he’s
skeptical V. natriegens itself could supplant E. coli in labs, but interest in
working out genetics tools for all kinds of obscure bacteria is only going to
continue to grow. E. coli is very good at growing in human bodies. But what if
synthetic biologists want to engineer bacteria that can sequester carbon in
oceans or ones that keep plants healthy during a drought? Well then you want
bacteria that, after millions of years of evolution, are already very good at
living in oceans or living soil.
Source: Wired
dot com
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