Word: escherichia
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Last week, as a meat-loving nation watched the largest beef recall in history, everyone knew the culprit: a lethal strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli. The bug causes 20,000 infections a year in the U.S., most because of undercooked beef. The typical result is excruciating gastrointestinal distress. But for a few unlucky souls though--usually young children and the elderly--the consequences can be dire, even fatal...
...tried by Biogen and other companies. Scientists chemically snip a gene from the DNA of one organism. The gene, which contains the code for producing a certain protein, is then chemically spliced into the DNA of another life form, usually a harmless laboratory strain of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. Now the genetically reprogrammed bug has the ability to produce something new. It begins cranking out the protein and, given the proper nourishment, making millions of carbon copies of itself, each capable of producing the same protein. Though each creates only a tiny amount, the cumulative output...
...Francisco and at a small commercial research firm, Genentech Inc., in nearby Palo Alto, used human pituitary tissue to construct the gene, or DNA segment, responsible for the production of somatotropin. They then implanted it in the genetic machinery of a laboratory strain of the common intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. The gene splicing worked: the re-engineered bugs began to make...
Judson wisely avoids such hyperbole. Even a generation after molecular biology's birth, its midwives are usually experimenting with nothing higher on the evolutionary ladder than the intestinal bacterium Escherichia coli. Judson's characters are not primarily interested in great practical payoffs but in a grand intellectual quest: solving puzzles, under standing nature rather than dominating it. The game is science for science's sake...
Synthesizing copies of these genes, or segments of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), was difficult enough. But much harder was the job of getting the genetic instructions inside the potential bacterial factory, a weakened lab strain of the intestinal microbe Escherichia coli. The scientists resorted to a little molecular chicanery. Using their new gene-splicing or recombinant DNA techniques, they hitched their two synthetic insulin genes individually to one of the bacterium's own genes. Then they inserted both the synthetic and the natural material into fresh E. coli. As a result, E. coli's DNA-reading machinery was unable...