History[edit]
In 1885, Theodor Escherich, a German pediatrician, first discovered this species in the feces of healthly individuals and called it Bacterium coli commune due to the fact it is found in the colon and early classifications of Prokaryotes placed these in a handful of genera based on their shape and motility (at that time Ernst Haeckel's classification of Bacteria in the kingdom Monera was in place[3]).[4]
Following a revision of Bacteria it was reclassified as Bacillus coli by Migula in 1895[5] and later reclassified as Escherichia coli [6]
Due to its ease of culture and fast doubling it was used in the early microbiology experiments, however bacteria were considered primitive and pre-cellular and received little attention before 1944, when Avery, Macleod and McCarty demonstrated that DNA was the genetic material using Salmonella typhimurium, following which Escherichia coli was used for linkage mapping studies [7]