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9
The Second of the Microbe Hunters
The hunt was on for "The perfect E. coli". The question? How many genes and in what order would make the current most popular strain the best it could possibly be? It was a long and knotty process involving artificially supplementing all known genes from every life form (and virus, Eskimo, nun chuck, toy gonk etc.) in every possible order (including the E. coli genome itself) into the regular E.coli mish-mash. On top of this, every possible gene of random base pairs (real and synthetic codons) up to 5kb in size was also tested in this manner. As you can imagine, this process (although semi-automated, with routine tasks performed by the elderly, infirm, zero-hour government partnerships or outsourced to sweat shops (“I mean sweet shops”) in China) took a while, so Venter and co took a long sabbatical, sequencing a load of bollocks (Fig 1) in various tropical seas.3 At the end of it all, the perfect E. coli was found, and the results were surprising. It has turned out that the process (despite much panicking, double checking and shouting at the interns) had produced the very E. coli genome known exotically as "wild type", Fig 2. Whilst the name is not an unfortunate joke about the organism's sexuality, it became apparent that logical engineering just couldn't match 500 million or more years of selective evolution. Daaaaaamn yooooooooouuuuu Daaaaaaarwiiiiiiiin! Back to the drawing board-room.
1. Gibson, D. G. et al. Complete chemical synthesis, assembly, and cloning of a Mycoplasma genitalium genome. Science 319, 1215–20 (2008).
2. Fraser, C. M. et al. The minimal gene complement of Mycoplasma genitalium. Science 270, 397–403 (1995).
3. Venter, J. C. et al. Environmental genome shotgun sequencing of the Sargasso Sea. Science 304, 66–74 (2004).
Figure 2. Original E. coli strain compared to the new “Wild-type” creation. Vast differences an improvements can be observed in the right hand image compared to that of the original strain (left).
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