The Evolutionary Maintenance of Amino Acid Prototrophy in Escherichia coli.

Abstract excerpt

Escherichia coli is a prototroph and can synthesize all twenty proteinogenic amino acids when required to grow in minimal medium. There are approximately sixty protein-coding genes individually essential for amino acid synthesis. This is a large mutational target for the accumulation of detrimental mutations. E. coli can rewire biosynthetic pathways in response to mutational damage, but the limits of this...

Topics

• Escherichia coli
• Amino Acids
• Evolution, Molecular
• Mutation
• Gene Transfer, Horizontal
• Escherichia coli Proteins