**The Coherent Core of the Proteome: Backward Elimination on Protein Interaction Networks Identifies Essential Genes in E. coli K-12**

We apply the Coherence Engine — a backward elimination algorithm operating on a structural coherence matrix W — to the protein interaction network of E. coli K-12, using STRING interaction data and DisProt-verified intrinsically disordered protein (IDP) classifications. The engine identifies a coherent core of 420 proteins (84% of N=500) characterized by high network connectivity (mean STRING degree = 17.4 vs 6.4 for excluded proteins, t-test p < 0.0001) and significant enrichment for essential genes (OR = 8.09, p = 0.006, Fisher exact test). All six pre-registered ZKP falsifiability predictions are satisfied (6/6, CM_Éter = 1.000). The coherent core corresponds to the central metabolic infrastructure of E. coli — glycolysis, TCA cycle, respiratory chain, and ribosomal machinery — identified from network topology alone, without using biological pathway annotations as input. This result constitutes the second empirical validation of TCS universality, complementing the galactic-scale result in Cortes (2026a) where baryon-dominated galaxies form the coherent core of the SPARC rotation curve sample.