A Book Review from Adaptive Complexity: Microcosm E. coli and The New Science of Life

After reading this review [ http://www.scientificblogging.com/adaptive_complexity/e_coli_as_biologys_decoder_ring? ] from Michael White [ http://www.scientificblogging.com/mwhite74/feed ] on a book from Carl Zimmer [ http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/ ] titled 'Microcosm: E. coli and The New Science of Life' [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/search?ie=UTF8&keywords=Zimmer%20e.%20Coli&tag=funnierthanyo-20&index=books&linkCode=ur2&camp=1789&creative=9325 ], I am quite eager to read this book.
Presently I am reading a book recommended by Myers [ http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/ ] titled 'Developmental Plasticity and Evolution' [ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0195122356 ] by Mary Jane West-Eberhard [ http://www.stri.org/english/scientific_staff/staff_scientist/scientist.php?id=35 ]. This along with the article referred in the above review 'Evolutionary Dynamics of Prokaryotic Transcriptional Regulatory Networks' [ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2006.02.019 ] by Madan Babu and Eisen talking about one of the heroes of bioinformatics at http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2008/06/connection-between-video-games-and.html , I am pretty much convinced that Evolutionary biology has lot of opportunity for Bioinformatics guys to be busy for eternity, not just "500 years of exciting problems" [ http://tex.loria.fr/historique/interviews/knuth-clb1993.html ]!

clipped from www.scientificblogging.com For such a slender book, Microcosm covers a wide-ranging selection of science. Zimmer begins by recapping the key events in the history of molecular biology, events in which E. coli was frequently a central player. Once scientists realized that E. coli had genes just like animals and plants, this gut bacterium gradually became one of the favorite model research systems in the then hot, new science of molecular biology. Experiments in E. coli revealed how genes are structured, how DNA is replicated, and how genes are controlled. Marshall Nirenberg and his colleagues cracked the essentially universal genetic code using cellular components from E. coli. Joshua Lederberg used bacterial 'sex' to bring the formidable tools of genetics to bacterial studies. Today, E. coli is the most well-mapped organism on the planet.