How Escherichia coli Became the Flagship Bacterium of Molecular Biology

Abstract

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.