Friday 27 September 2013

Quoting Donald Rumsfeld

Some of you may remember (perhaps not very fondly) Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense in the administration of George W. Bush. Surprisingly, the title of our latest publication actually quotes Donald Rumsfeld, whose famously said
"There are known knowns; there are things we know that we know.
There are known unknowns; that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – there are things we do not know we don't know."

We've just published a paper in the journal PLoS One entitled Dead End Metabolites- Defining the Known Unknowns of the E. coli Metabolic Network. E. coli is the best model organism for studying bacteria, it is the single bacterium we know the most about after 50-60 years of study, and yet we still don't know what a quarter of it's genes do. In this paper, we use the E. coli metabolic network represented in the EcoCyc database, and try and work out what are the gaps in our knowledge about E. coli metabolism, or as Donald Rumsfeld would put it- what are the known unknowns of E. coli metabolism. Hopefully this list of known unknowns provides researchers targets for future study to enlarge our understanding of E. coli. As for the unknown unknowns, um well I guess we don't know yet.

E. coli is the one with the name tag

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