Falsely colored E. coliWikimedia, MattosaurusEpigenetics may hold the answer to the virulent strain of E. coli that swept across Germany in May and June 2011, causing thousands of infections and dozens of deaths, according to a study published yesterday (November 8) in Nature Biotechnology.
At the time of the outbreak, researchers around the world worked furiously to sequence the genome of the unknown E. coli strain and identify its virulence secrets. The experience was a testament to the power of current sequencing technologies—allowing researchers to achieve a complete genome sequence within just 3 days—but it also showed its limitations. The genome sequence alone could not explain the fast and furious outbreak.
To get to the bottom of the mystery, Eric Schadt, director of Mount Sinai’s Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, and colleagues at Harvard Medical School took a second look at the genome, this time focusing not on the base pairs themselves, but on their epigenetic marks. “The information content of the genetic code is not limited to ...
