Escherichia coli O11 belongs to Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC), which can cause food-borne disease, hemorrhagic colitis, and hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS) in humans. Because of its character of specificity, the O-antigen gene cluster provides the best material for the selection of molecular markers which can be used for rapid genotyping of bacterial strain. In this study, the E.coli O11 O-antigen gene cluster was amplified by Long-range PCR and was sequenced using Shotgun-sequencing approach. Twelve open reading frames were assigned functions on the basis of homology in the E. coli O11 O-antigen gene cluster, including UDP-N-acetyl glucosamine-4-epimerase gene (gne), genes responsible for the biosynthesis of GDP-L-fucose (gmd, fcl, gmm, manC, manB), glycosyl transferase genes, O-unit flippase gene (wzx) and O-antigen polymerase gene (wzy). By polymerase chain reaction against representative stains for all the 166 E. coli and 43 Shigella O serotypes, two genes and four pairs of primers were identified to be specific to E. coli O11. Further PCR was done to detect E. coli O11 from the environmental specimens, and the sensitivities for detecting E.coli O11 from the pork and dejecta specimens were 0.25 cfu/g and 2.5 x 10(3) cfu/g, respectively. Moreover, eight probes were designed and proved to be unique to E. coli O11, which provides the basis for a sensitive test of the rapid detection of E. coli O11 by DNA microarray method.