When a nasty strain of E. coli flooded hospitals in Germany this summer, it struck its victims with life-threatening complications far more often than most strains—and the search for an explanation began.

During a feverish weekend after the rogue bacterium’s genome was sequenced, scientists from all over the world submitted the E. coli genome to rounds of rigorous study. Thanks to a unique computer program and cloud-computing test bed developed by Argonne National Laboratory, researchers mapped the strain’s genes and came a little closer to understanding the bacterium’s secrets.

A team of Argonne scientists developed the Rapid Annotation Using Subsystems Technology (RAST) program in 2007. The program, which is free and open to any scientist, is designed to make sense of the jumble of letters that makes up an organism’s DNA.

A genome is a long, incomprehensible string of letters in a four-letter alphabet: G, A, T, C. Sections of the string are divided into genes. Each one describes how to build a protein, and proteins build all of the parts of the cell.

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