Word: bacterium
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Approved by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1996, so-called Bt corn has become enormously popular with farmers, and now accounts for up to 25% of the U.S. corn crop, or about 20 million acres. By splicing DNA from the common soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis into the corn's genes, scientists have created a plant that turns out the same toxin as the bug. While the toxin is deadly to the corn borer, which costs U.S. growers more than $1 billion annually, it is harmless to humans--as well as to such beneficial insects as ladybugs and honeybees. Indeed, organic...
...powerful computers to determine where the tiny fragments overlap. This is tough enough when you're sequencing a small part of a chromosome. But now Smith urged Venter to try it out, not merely on a strip of DNA but on an entire genome. He proposed Haemophilus influenzae, a bacterium that causes ear infections and meningitis. Until then, only a few small viruses, whose genomes had tens of thousands of genetic letters, had been entirely decoded. H. flu had 1.8 million...
...within a year had been transformed from a government scientist with a $2,000 savings account to a millionaire. He gave gifts of stock to his family and Fraser's, and bought the Sorcerer. Meanwhile, he continued to pour money into genomics, completing gene maps of the Haemophilus influenzae bacterium in 1995, followed by those of H. pylori, which causes ulcers, and the syphilis microbe...
...always so benign. That year 26 people in Oregon were felled by a violent infection and intestinal disorder, and when doctors analyzed the bug behind the illness, they found that it was all but indistinguishable from ordinary E. coli, with but a small exception: this breed of the bacterium contained a few strands of genetic reweaving that cause it to produce a powerful toxin its less potent...
...outbreak had spread to 13 states--or at least it seemed to have. Thirteen states could also mean 13 separate outbreaks. Earlier this year, the CDC took a step to eliminate such uncertainty, employing an innovative network of biotech machines called PulseNet. The hardware allows scientists to scan a bacterium and come up with a sort of genetic fingerprint unique to that cell line. Studying samples of the Wyoming E. coli as well as bugs from the surrounding states, the EIS researchers discovered that their profiles matched perfectly. The Alpine infection, it appeared, was indeed widespread...