Word: bacterium
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...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...
Regardless of how Alpine's water tasted, there was in fact something grievously--perhaps lethally--wrong with it. That something was a particularly dangerous strain of the E. coli bacterium called E. coli O157:H7, or O157 for short. Ordinarily a benign organism found in the intestines of human beings and animals, E. coli has a nasty ability to mutate and proliferate. Lately it has been proliferating with a vengeance. Five years ago, the fast-food industry was rocked when four children died and 500 other people fell ill after eating E. coli O157-contaminated hamburgers at Jack...
...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...
Venter exudes confidence and points to TIGR's track record. Using the shotgun approach, his company has already sequenced the DNA of seven microorganisms, including the bacterium that causes ulcers. That number, he notes, represents half of all the genomes decoded to date. "The [human] genome will be accurately and completely covered," Venter promised the science subcommittee last week. And as proof he promised to sequence the genome of the fruit fly (which is far more complex than those of bacteria) within a year...