Escherichia coli

An outbreak of E. coli infection in the UK, linked to salad leaves which ended up in prepacked sandwiches and similar foods from several retailers, makes me revisit a post from 2015 (that long ago!) and update it.  Here are some resources, first about Shiga toxin producing E. coli (STEC), which is causing the problem in the UK, and then about E. coli and E. coli infection in general.

There is a United Kingdom Health Security Agency press release about the current STEC outbreak in the UK.

Public Health Scotland have information specifically about STEC, as does the Northern Ireland Public Health Agency, and the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.

Then there is general E. coli and health information from the United Kingdom Health Security Agency, and information from NHS Scotland (NHS Inform) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

And then information in EcoliWiki, about non pathogenic E. coli.  PortEco, the producer of this site, is described in this 2014 paper in the annual Database issue of Nucleic Acids Research (if you use the data resource, it is accepted practice to cite the paper, and not the website where the resource lives).   EcoCyc is a database for E. coli K-12 MG1655, performing "literature-based curation of the entire genome" and covering transcriptional regulation, transporters, and metabolic pathways.   There is an overview in the Encyclopedia of Life, which includes articles, data and maps.

A page of results for a search of the National Center for Biotechnology Information site for sources from all NCBI databases includes a direct link to the Taxonomy database.    It includes a PubMed link which gives you absolutely everything, so this PubMed link, specifically for Shiga toxin producing E. coli papers from 2024, might be more effective.

Escherichia coli

The University of Sheffield's Krebs Festival, in honour of the work of Hans Krebs, is currently under way, and as part of this, there is this giant inflatable E. coli in the Winter Gardens, made by Luke Jerram:

Pathogenic E. coli make it to the news (see this site from the CDC or this one from the NHS about O157), but it is also an important experimental organism, and here are some sites about that:

eLS (Encyclopedia of the Life Sciences)  - you will need a subscription, or your institution will*, to read the full thing, although a summary is freely available which outlines E. coli's importance in genetics and molecular biology.

EcoliWiki, about non pathogenic E. coli.

PortEco (who produce EcoliWiki), a data resource.   PortEco is described in this paper in the annual Database issue of Nucleic Acids Research (if you use the data resource, it is accepted practice to cite the paper, and not the website where the resource lives).

EcoCyc, a database for E. coli K-12 MG1655, performing "literature-based curation of the entire genome" and covering transcriptional regulation, transporters, and metabolic pathways. 

NCBI - across all databases

Encyclopedia of Life


* the University of Leicester does.  Email us if you have problems accessing it!

Another use for E. coli

Interesting item in SciDev.Net about using genetically modified E. coli to detect landmines.

The bacteria have the gene for an enzyme called luciferase (this is present in fireflies, for one), which naturally produces light in some bacteria and fireflies. When TNT is present, this gene is switched on, and the bacteria glow. This can happen within hours of the bacteria being introduced to the region under investigation. Plants can be modified in the same way, but take weeks or months to produce results.

The work is not yet commercially available - European Union regulations on genetically modified bacteria need to be observed.

There is a protein in the cell membrane that senses TNT, according to the item. The work was done at the University of Edinburgh, by Alistair Elfick at the Centre for Biomedical Engineering.

Luciferase has also been used in bioluminiscent imaging, to detect tumour cells, although I can't immediately find anything published about its application to landmines.

Silencing Genomes

Another site "found" via the Internet Scout Project.

Silencing Genomes is to do with RNAi. The discovery of RNAi won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2006.

I quote from the Silencing Genomes site:

"RNAi is a mechanism that down-regulates gene expression when double-stranded RNA (ds-RNA) molecules that correspond to a part of a "target gene" are present in a cell. By deliberately introducing defined sequences of dsRNA into living organisms, biologists can observe the physiological consequences of "silencing" virtually any gene in C. elegans, as well as other plants and animals."

There are parts of the site dealing with culturing E. coli, C. elegans, observing wild type and mutant C. elegans, and with RNAi.