The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/tag/e-coli/)
Driven by the desire to end the devastation caused by the pandemic, Prof. Matthew DeLisa, chemical engineering, turned E. coli bacterium into a powerful biotechnology tool to yield fast answers to COVID-19 questions.
More than a year after a sweeping bacterial outbreak led Cornell Dining — along with tens of thousands of other restaurants nationwide — to throw out all of its romaine lettuce, E.coli has returned, once again prompting concerns over how to safely consume lettuce.
Cornell Dining removed all romaine lettuce from its 27 on-campus dining facilities after an outbreak of E. coli infected over 60 people across 16 states.
Michael Moss, a New York Times investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize winner, spoke about his effort to expose harmful impacts of the processed food industry and its advertising strategies in a lecture Wednesday. Moss drew heavily from his 2013 book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Fast Food Giants Hooked Us in his talk. He recalled reporting on the Iraq War in 2008 for the New York Times when he said his editor assigned him to write about a salmonella outbreak in the U.S. caused by tainted peanuts from the Peanut Corporation of America. “These peanuts were being used as ingredients in this $1 trillion processed food industry about which we really know very little,” Moss said. “That outbreak became the story about how that industry had lost control over its food chain.”
Moss said this first experience with food safety reporting later led him to report on an E. Coli outbreak in Minneapolis in 2007, food industry.
By SNEHA KABARIA
A team of Cornell chemical engineers in partnership with New England Biolabs have developed a method to efficiently produce antibodies in the cytoplasm in E. coli bacteria, leading to a new drug development platform. The research was led by co-senior author Prof. Matthew DeLisa, chemical engineering, and first author Michael-Paul Robinson ’16 grad. Robinson is part of the Cornell Sloan and Colman Fellowship Program, which supplied funding for the project. The research, which has been ongoing for approximately five years, was published in a paper entitled “Efficient expression of full-length antibodies in the cytoplasm of engineered bacteria” in Nature Communications on Aug. 17.