E. coli, Nastier Than Ever–Cause for Comfort?

ByCarl Zimmer
March 19, 2008

Well, we’re down now to seven weeks till Microcosm hits the book stores. Here and elsewhere I’m going to discuss some of the fascinating things I discovered about E. coli–and life in general–while working on the book. For instance, I came to have a grudging respect for the vicious strain of E. coli known as O157:H7, which has caused outbreaks in recent years in contaminated foods. The weaponry it uses to attack and subvert our cells is quite impressive. But my respect went up a notch more when scientists recently reported how E. coli O157:H7 has been continuing to evolve into an even nastier bug. Over at Slate today, I explain why there’s a silver lining in this microbial cloud–it means we should be a bit skeptical that anyone is going to engineer a killer bug from scratch any time soon.

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