Escherichia coli in molecular biology

[2] In 1885, Theodor Escherich, a German pediatrician, first discovered this species in the feces of healthy individuals and called it Bacterium coli commune because it is found in the colon and early classifications of Prokaryotes placed these in a handful of genera based on their shape and motility (at that time Ernst Haeckel's classification of Bacteria in the kingdom Monera was in place[3]).

[6] Due to its ease of culture and fast doubling, it was used in the early microbiology experiments; however, bacteria were considered primitive and pre-cellular and received little attention before 1944, when Avery, Macleod and McCarty demonstrated that DNA was the genetic material using Salmonella typhimurium, following which Escherichia coli was used for linkage mapping studies.

[8] Due to the lack of specific record-keeping, the "pedigree" of strains was not available and had to be inferred by consulting lab-book and records in order to set up the E. coli Genetic Stock Centre at Yale by Barbara Bachmann.

An extensive list of Escherichia coli K-12 strain derivatives and their individual construction, genotypes, phenotypes, plasmids and phage information can be viewed at Ecoliwiki.

[8] The strain of d'Herelle was passed to Jules Bordet, Director of the Institut Pasteur du Brabant in Bruxelles[16] and his student André Gratia.

[22] Because of its long history of laboratory culture and ease of manipulation, E. coli also plays an important role in modern biological engineering and industrial microbiology.

[23] The work of Stanley Norman Cohen and Herbert Boyer in E. coli, using plasmids and restriction enzymes to create recombinant DNA, became a foundation of biotechnology.

[33][34] These features protect wild type strains from antibodies and other chemical attacks, but require a large expenditure of energy and material resources.

[39] The long-term evolution experiments using E. coli, begun by Richard Lenski in 1988, have allowed direct observation of major evolutionary shifts in the laboratory.

As the inability to grow aerobically is normally used as a diagnostic criterion with which to differentiate E. coli from other, closely related bacteria such as Salmonella, this innovation may mark a speciation event observed in the lab.