Abacterium was the birthplace of genetic engineering, one of the most revolutionary technologies in science. And since those first experiments with bacteria back in the 1960s, hundreds of new medicines and products have become commonplace. But genetic engineering is only the tip of the microbial iceberg. To understand how microbes work in the world around us and how they affect our lives, scientists are recording their entire genetic code.

Writing the Book of Bacteria

In 1994 the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced the beginning of the Microbial Genome Project. A genome is the complete set of instructions for making any organism. It is the "parts list" of the organ ism's DNA-the list of letters that represent the base

pairs that make up the DNA strand. A single microbial genome may contain between 500,000 to 8 million DNA base pairs; the human...