Why is the E. coli bacteria so important in biotechnology?

E. coli. Escherichia coli (E. coli) is a rod-shaped bacterium that lives in the gut of warm-blooded animals. It is a crucial tool in modern biotechnology. Scientists use E. ... Because of its important role in genetics and biotechnology, it was one of the earliest genome sequences to be completed. read more

E.coli became key to biotechnology because it was easy and fast to culture and some early experimemters happened to use it and its phage for experiments to work out the nature of the genetic code and how genetic control works. Things snowballed from there - E.coli had the most methods, so it was a good choice for developing new methods. read more

Actually speaking the unique characteristics of the E. coli bacteria makes them an important tool in biotechnology industries and it is the most preferred organism by the researchers to perform recombinant technology (gene cloning) based experiments. read more

However, unlike some anaerobic bacteria E. coli also grows well in aerobic environments, such as a culture flask in a laboratory. It grows fast. Under ideal conditions, individual E. coli cells can double every 20 minutes. At that rate, it would be possible to produce a million E. coli cells from one parent cell within about 7 hours. read more