Update on the Keio collection of <i>Escherichia coli</i> single‐gene deletion mutants

The Keio collection (Baba et al, 2006) has been established as a set of single‐gene deletion mutants of Escherichia coli K‐12. These mutants have a precisely designed deletion from the second codon from the seventh to the last codon of each predicted ORF. Further information is available at http://sal.cs.purdue.edu:8097/GB7/index.jsp or http://ecoli.naist.jp/. The distribution is now being handled by the National Institute of Genetics of Japan (http://www.shigen.nig.ac.jp/ecoli/pec/index.jsp). To date more than 4 million samples have been distributed worldwide. As we described earlier (Baba et al, 2006), gene amplification during construction is likely to have led to a small number of mutants with genetic duplications.