Question

What is the normal environment of Escherichia Coli?

Answer 1

E. coli is a mesophile that grows best at 37 degrees Celsius in neutral pH environments. E. coli is a facultative aerobe and is able to grow without oxygen, but it can extract more energy from its nutrient source and grow faster if oxygen is present.

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Growing E. coli is easy and fast

Scientists first chose to work with E. coli because it was easy and fast to grow in the laboratory.

There are several features of E. coli that make it easy to culture:

• It likes it warm – but not too warm.Because E. coli is a gut bacterium, it grows best at body temperature (37.4ºC). This is an easy temperature for scientists to work with in the laboratory.
• It isn’t fussy about nutrition. E. coli can obtain energy from a wide variety of sources. In its natural environment (the gut), it consumes digested foodstuffs. In a laboratory context, E. coli can be fed easily and cheaply – think chicken soup for bacteria
• It can grow with or without oxygen. In the gut, E. coli grows anaerobically (in the absence of oxygen). However, unlike some anaerobic bacteriaE. coli also grows well in aerobicenvironments, such as a culture flask in a laboratory.
• It grows fast. Under ideal conditions, individual E. colicells can double every 20 minutes. At that rate, it would be possible to produce a million E. coli cells from one parent cellwithin about 7 hours. Fast growth means that experiments involving E. coli can be done quickly, conveniently and cheaply.

In its normal habitat of the intestinal tract, E. coli is beneficial. The bacteria participate in the digestion of food, and produce vitamin K and B—complex vitamins