Question

E. coli often comes to mind when reading about proteins and discussing them and it often makes headlines in the news. My challenge for this chapter's discussion topic is this: find a recent (within the last month) news article that involves E. coli and share it with the class. Why does it seem that this bacteria is always in the news? Remember, this chapter is the protein chapter, so why is E. coli so important to proteins and vice versa?

Please only typed, thorough answers and provide source!

Answer 1

Why does it seem that this bacteria is always in the news?

Escherichia Coli (E.coli) is one of the most chosen organisms to produce recombinant proteins. This bacteria is used as a cell factory to produce specific proteins. For this reason, E. Coli is one of the most popular organisms related to proteins and researchers are constantly improving novel techniques where they use this bacteria. Using this organism has a lot of advantages such as short culturing time, easy genetic manipulation and low cost.

Why is E. coli so important to proteins and vice versa?

The revolution of recombinant proteins has been a huge impact over the past years. E. coli has an important role in the study of proteins because this bacteria establish a novel point of view of how we obtain proteins. Before E.coli was used for the first time, researches had to invest a lot of sources to purify a protein of interest. In the past, scientist had to obtain kilograms of animal and plant tissues to purify certain proteins. Nowadays, scientists determine the gene of interest, clone it in an expression vector, transform it into the host of choice (E.coli), induce the expression of the protein and finally the protein is ready for purification and characterization.

In the area of health, E. Coli has been used to produce a lot of proteins to treat certain diseases. In may 2019, E. coli was used to produce a recombinant human insulin. Recently, there are some bad aspects about synthetic insulin produced by laboratories which could not make it function properly on diabetic patients. For this reason, researches has develop a novel recombinant insulin using E.coli.