An exciting Focused Research Organization (FRO): is systematically developing tools for working with non-model microorganisms.
As we walked, Lee told me that’s efforts to make “extraordinary” organisms accessible almost always follow the same basic steps. First, the team orders a microbe from ATCC, a non-profit group that has been storing and mailing microbes to researchers since 1925. The ATCC catalog includes more than 14,000 bacterial strains, the vast majority of which gather dust and are rarely ordered by researchers.
After receiving a microbe in the mail, sequences it. Mutations can creep into strains over time, and even a seemingly minor alteration—a single base swapped here or there—can change how cells grow and respond to their environment.
Lee told me that he once sequenced Vibrio natriegens stored in the ATCC database. Ten years later, a professor at Harvard ordered the same microbe from ATCC and sequenced its genome again. But the professor noticed a small change: the Vibrio cells now carried a single mutation in a ribosomal gene that made the cells sickly and slow-growing. This mutation had not been present when Lee studied the same microbes just a decade prior: evidence that nothing in biology remains constant. By sequencing the genome, constructs a record from which to diagnose future problems.
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