e.coli-most often studied in molecular biology of prokaryotes
The genes of E. coli are located on a circular chromosome of 4.6 million basepairs. This 1.6 mm long molecule is compressed into a highly organized structure which fits inside the 1-2 micrometer cell in a format which can still be read by the gene expression machinery.
Bacterial DNA is supercoiled by DNA gyrase. Chemical inhibition of gyrase without allowing the cells to reprogram gene expression relaxes supercoiling and expands the nucleoid, suggesting that supercoiling is one of the tools used to compress the genome