Escherichia coli

Escherichia coli is a gram negative rod found in the gut of most organisms. Many strains of E. coli are harmless, however some can be pathogenic like for example E. coli 0157 which can be a seriuos cause of gastroenteritis .

E. coli is often used as a model organinsm in lab experiments due to its fast reproduction time, how easily it is manipulated and its already sequenced genome. The E. coli strain K-12 is the strain most commonly used in the laboratory. It has 4.6 million nucleotide pairs in its genome that code for approxamately 4300 different proteins .