Metabolic pathway complements of eight Escherichia coli strains

We examined the metabolic capabilities of eight Escherichia coli strains in order to identify variations among these strains which might account for their alternate mechanisms of infection or levels of virulence. Our data set included two non-pathogenic strains, two diarrheagenic strains and four extra-intestinal pathogenic strains. The metabolic pathway complements of these strains were deduced using the Pathway Tools software. The results were hand-corrected using the NCBI database, EcoCyc, and tBLASTn. After curation, only 20 differences were discerned among the strains, but a few of these differences are intriguing. Two of the pathways are involved in the biosynthesis of lipopolysaccharides, which are known virulence determinants. Further research is needed to test the implications of our findings, but this study has identified possible metabolic variations that may prove significant for understanding the pathogenicity of different E. coli strains.