Literature Review on the Lac Operon of E.

Coli

The Escherichia coli, or the E. coli is a microorganism that lives in the human
colon. Its demonstrates a commensal symbiotic relationship (+,0) whereby the E. coli
obtains its nutrients and food from a human’s diet’. Since the cells are “bathed” with
whatever the host eats, it itself is living with uncertainty, hence the E.coli has
something called metabolic pathways that synthesis substances that at that point of the
time is needed by the cell to carry out metabolic reactions. A mechanism that
represents the metabolic pathways are called operons. (Campbell et al.,2018)

Dairy is one of the most common food groups that are consumed by humans on a
daily basis. For example, milk, butter, cheese, or even curry. One thing all these foods
have is the milk sugar, lactose. Lactose is a disaccharide formed thorough the
condensation of glucose and galactose. The E.coli uses glucose as its main source of
energy, however, when deprived from glucose, lactose will be an option to obtain
glucose. As the E.coli cell has only a hand full of enzymes to catabolise lactose, hence
they have operons that are specifically catered to produce more of these enzymes,
named the lac operon.

Operons are a group of genes that have related functions which becomes a
transcription unit for the synthesis of an mRNA. Operons can be switched on and off
with respect to presence or absence of inducers or repressors.The lac operon is an
inducible operon as it wil only activate with the presence of and inducer, otherwise
the lac operon will be deactivated by a repressor. This is to increase the efficiency of
the cell by not producing enzyme when there’s nothing to digest. The inducer for the
lac operon is allolactose, which is an isomer of lactose which will bind to the
repressor to switch the operon back on. When the operon is activated, starting from
the promoter region, RNA polymerase will transcript the genes on the operon into an
mRNA strand which will then be translated to a polypeptide chain that will be
furthered modified into enzymes. The mRNA strand produced is said to be
polycistronic as it contains genetic information and code for more than one gene.
(Campbell et al., 2018; Mader & Windelspecht, 2017)

With the lac operon available in the E.coli system, it gives rise to its hardy nature
whereby it is able to survive in an erratic environment, provided that the lac operon is
fully functional and not influenced by mutation.