How has the bacterium E. coli played a role in the development of biotechnology?

Answer 1

Escherichia coli has been for biotechnology, as Drosophila melanogaster (the fruit fly) to Genetics or Mus musculus (common mice) to pharmacology, a very useful tool. By its nature, E. coli presents some characteristics that converts it in a potent organism to biotech efforts, such as:

1. A very short life span that permits to obtain results generation by generation in a very rapid way;
   
2. A large production of bacteria for the next generation, resulted from the rapid reproduction of the progenie;
3. The absence of nucleus and therefore of nuclear envelope that makes it easy to work with its genome;
4. The capacity to adopt new genetic information into its genome (called in biotechnology: "genetic transformation"), making this bacterium a powerful tool to move and express a large number of genes from different organisms;
5. In industrial biotechnology, E. coli has been used for manufacturing of a large number of biotech drugs widely used in pharmacology for treatment of degenerative diseases in human beings (e.g., the chains of insulin molecule, erythropoietin, human growth factor, etc.).