Genomics Blog
When I woke up this morning, the big news was that the genome of Penicillin has been determined. The paper will be published in the journal Nature corresponding with the discovery of Penicillin by Sir Alexander Fleming 80 years ago. Learning about the famous discovery as the accidental contamination of a Petri dish is a standard part of high school biology courses. It is often used as a prime example of luck being the meeting of opportunity and the prepared mind. Undergrad students of microbiology often get first hand experience with penicillin contamination in their lab experiments, much to the horror and chagrin of the post-doc supervising the lab.
According to the press release, there was the requirement to sequence 32.2 million base pairs with 13,653 unique genes. Incredible when you think that humans have only about 20,000 genes. Well, maybe not as we continue to learn that a number of genes code in different ways depending on the way noncoding interons interact.
The press release also states that “It is an absolute leap forward in the field of these antibiotics and it will generate many innovative development opportunities for both classical and new products”
Genome Alberta is also involved with a project to sequencing a fungal genome. The bluestain fungus which is one of the organisms associated with the Pine Beetle system is an integral portion of the new Tria Project. Keep watching this site for further announcements.
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Comments
Anne - www.anne-blythe.blogspot.com
Isn't it genome of Penicillium? Penicillin is just the antibiotic and not the organism.
Gerry Ward - http://genomealberta.ca/blogs/
Thanks for the comment Anne, I recognized immediately that I got caught up in the sloppy language of the radio station I was listening to as I was waking up, and that I missed a fabulous teachable moment. You have given me that opportunity again.
Almost since Carolus Linnaeus in the early 1700’s tried to name everything in the natural world by a two part name, Biologists have used the system now called binomial nomenclature to uniquely identify biological organisms with a genus and species name. Way back when we still wrote by hand, the convention was to write the genus name first with the first letter capitalized and the species name followed all in lower case. Then when the word processors came along, we were able to put the name in italics just like in the texts. Unfortunately, this comment box does not allow me that convention.
One major advantage of the binomial nomenclature is that it allows for clarity when the common names used regionally are the same for different organisms. This is especially true for wild flowers and some birds. For example, the bird that is called a Robin in North America is classified as Turdus migratorius, whereas the Robin in Europe is Erithacus rubecula; two entirely different birds.
The fungus which Alexander Fleming first isolated the drug he called penicillin from in 1929 , he identified as Penicillium notatum. In the press release linked above, the organism is described as Penicillium chrysogenum. Penicillin is indeed the antibiotic and Penicillium the scientific name of the genus that produces it.