Department of Microbiology, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.
Department of Molecular Biology, Princeton Universitygrid.16750.35, Princeton, New Jersey, USA.
J Bacteriol. 2022 Sep 20;204(9):e0023022. doi: 10.1128/jb.00230-22. Epub 2022 Aug 2.
Escherichia coli is likely the most studied organism and was instrumental in developing many fundamental concepts in biology. But why E. coli? In the 1940s, E. coli was well suited for the biochemical and genetic research that blended to become the seminal field of biochemical genetics and led to the realization that processes already known to occur in complex organisms were conserved in bacteria. This now-obvious concept, combined with the advantages offered by its easy cultivation, ultimately drove many researchers to shift from the complexity of eukaryotic models to the simpler bacterial system, which eventually led to the development of molecular biology. As knowledge and experimental tools amassed, a positive-feedback loop fixed the central role of E. coli in research. However, given the vast diversity among bacteria and even among E. coli strains, it was by many fortuitous events that E. coli rose to the top as an experimental model. Here, we share how serendipity and its own biology selected E. coli as the flagship bacterium of molecular biology.
大肠杆菌很可能是研究最多的生物体，它在生物学的许多基本概念的发展中发挥了重要作用。但为什么是大肠杆菌呢？在 20 世纪 40 年代，大肠杆菌非常适合融合成为生物化学遗传学这一开创性领域的生化和遗传学研究，这也导致人们意识到，在复杂生物体中已经发生的过程在细菌中是保守的。这一现在显而易见的概念，加上其易于培养的优势，最终促使许多研究人员从真核模型的复杂性转向更简单的细菌系统，这最终导致了分子生物学的发展。随着知识和实验工具的积累，正反馈环固定了大肠杆菌在研究中的核心作用。然而，鉴于细菌之间甚至大肠杆菌菌株之间的巨大多样性，大肠杆菌之所以成为实验模型，是有许多偶然事件的。在这里，我们分享的是机缘巧合和它自身的生物学是如何将大肠杆菌选为分子生物学的旗舰细菌的。
