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ONE of the world’s most prolific killers has a sweet tooth. Streptococcus
pneumoniae kills 3 million children each year. Now Herve Tettelin and his
colleagues at the Institute for Genomic Research in Rockville, Maryland, have
worked out its DNA code. Compared with other bacteria, a surprisingly high
number of genes are for scavenging and digesting sugars. The results appear in
Science (vol 293, p 498).