Rod-shaped bacterium common in the gut of warm-blooded animals, widely used as a model organism in genetics and microbiology and studied for pathogenic strains.
Hosei University researchers report that E. coli detects glucose-6-phosphate released by Bifidobacterium through its Uhp sensor. They suggest the signal works only if the two species live within 40 micrometres of each other.
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University of Patras researchers found sand mixed with biochar from brewery malt rootlets removed about five times as much E. coli as sand alone. The tests ran in the lab, and the team plans to try the material under less predictable real-world conditions next.
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Researchers engineered Escherichia coli with up to 15 nitroreductase gene deletions that let the cells retain nitroaromatic compounds normal strains destroy. Industry makes these chemicals with nitric acid under heat and hazard that a cell-based route avoids.
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Helmholtz Center researchers and collaborators built a 21-species gut community and found plant fiber boosted Segatella copri only when Enterobacteriaceae such as E. coli were also present. The result complicates diet-only accounts of why industrialized and nonindustrialized gut microbiomes differ.
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EPFL researchers found that E. coli in nutrient broth with 62.5% plasma-activated water reached about twice the control's viable count. For anyone using the water as a disinfectant, the lethal dose has to be measured in the liquid actually being treated.
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Karlsruhe Institute of Technology researchers made millimetre-sized beads whose structural material is the enzymes themselves, with no inert carrier. The format aims to make biocatalysts as easy to store, ship and dose as industrial chemistry requires.
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ISTA biologists report that starving E. coli use phages and CRISPR-Cas to swap and absorb DNA more than 100 times as often as spontaneous mutation. The team describes it as a primitive form of sexual reproduction that may speed how populations adapt.
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E. coli survived longer in poultry-amended Georgia onion soils than in untreated soil across two seasons, a Risk Analysis study found. Humidity went with longer survival and wind with shorter, so growers' food-safety plans may need to reflect local weather.
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A microfluidic experiment held the present identical and varied the past. That design is what separates a reaction from a memory. A mathematical model then placed that memory in ribosomes, though no one watched a ribosome directly.
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Researchers in Japan engineered gut E. coli to make or withhold putrescine, and the producing strains raised male fly lifespan to 13.8 days from 11.0. The design isolates a microbial metabolite as a cause, though the effect broke down in females.
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A team trained on antimicrobial peptide data to rank a library of 1.7 million polymers, then sent to the bench the candidates its models split hardest over, on the theory that the models' disagreement marks the experiments most likely to be informative.
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A Seoul National University group rearranged a self-splicing intron so bacterial transcripts join their own ends inside the cell. Most of the extra protein came from mRNA that lasts longer, and the design worked in three hosts.
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Two Science papers name the protein VIPR and show it silencing a reporter gene and blocking phage in E. coli, guided by an RNA that reads two DNA letters and skips the third, a targeting rule anyone borrowing it will have to design around.
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Gut phage therapy usually fails because you cannot get enough phage to enough bacteria in time. A team writing in Nature Microbiology built a resident E. coli that makes the phage on site, and it protected mice against an oral Salmonella challenge.
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Sang Yup Lee's group at KAIST rebuilt the bacterium's metabolism to assemble two aromatic PHA polymers from sugar. The best titre reached 52.8 grams per litre. The stronger of the two polymers was the weaker producer.
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Purified bacterial mRNA aggregates in a tube, roughly as physical chemistry predicts. Whitehead researchers report that real E. coli sequences interact less than computer-made synonyms, and read that gap as selection for solubility.
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The enzyme that loads methionine onto tRNA in this cell-invading bacterium is twice the size of the E. coli version. Rebecca Alexander's lab at Wake Forest reports that the extra half looks like a second enzyme.
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UC San Diego's cryo-EM structures show E. coli's transcription enzyme accepting hachimoji letters, with a companion paper finding it needs no hydrogen bonds to do so. Neither experiment happened inside a living cell.
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In an aligned fluid, a Caltech group reports in PNAS, colonies grow as chains one cell wide that run straight and then kink in a single tight spot, which hands part of colony architecture to the medium.
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Harvard's Church lab reports AGENTEX in Nature: engineered tRNAs and ribosomes in a cell-free mix. Nobody has to recode an organism to prototype a genetic code any more.
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