The proteins belonging to the Fur family are global regulators of gene expression involved in the response to several environmental stresses and to the maintenance of divalent cation homeostasis. The Mycobacterium tuberculosis genome encodes two Fur-like proteins, FurA and a protein formerly annotated FurB. Since in this paper we show that it represents a zinc uptake regulator, we refer to it a...

Aminoglycosides, amikacin (AK) and kanamycin (KM) are second line anti-tuberculosis drugs used to treat tuberculosis (TB) and resistance to them affects the treatment. Membrane and membrane associated proteins have an anticipated role in biological processes and pathogenesis and are potential targets for the development of new diagnostics/vaccine/therapeutics. In this study we compared membrane...

The Excreted/Secreted (ES) proteins play important roles during Mycobacterium tuberculosis invasion, virulence, and survival inside the host and they are a major source of immunogenic proteins. However, the molecular complexity of the bacillus cell wall has made difficult the experimental isolation of the total bacterial ES proteins. Here, we reported the genomes of two Beijing genotype M. tube...

Cellular and humoral immunity induced by Mycobacterium tuberculosis has led to identification of newer vaccine candidates, but despite this, many questions concerning the protection against tuberculosis remain unanswered. Recent progress in this field has centered on T cell subset responses and cytokines that these cells secrete. There has been a steady progress in identification and characteri...

Inhibition of apoptotic death of macrophages by Mycobacterium tuberculosis represents an important mechanism of virulence that results in pathogen survival both in vitro and in vivo. To identify M. tuberculosis virulence determinants involved in the modulation of apoptosis, we previously screened a transposon bank of mutants in human macrophages, and an M. tuberculosis clone with a nonfunctiona...

BACKGROUND The identification of Mycobacterium tuberculosis vaccines that elicit a protective immune response in the lungs is important for the development of an effective vaccine against tuberculosis. METHODS AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS In this study, a comparison of intranasal (i.n.) and subcutaneous (s.c.) vaccination with the BCG vaccine demonstrated that a single moderate dose delivered intra...

BACKGROUND Biomarkers of progression from latent Mycobacterium tuberculosis infection to active tuberculosis are needed. We assessed correlations between infection outcome and antibody responses in macaques and humans by high-throughput, proteome-scale serological studies. METHODS Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteome microarrays were probed with serial sera from macaques representing various i...

Tuberculosis (TB) is a contagious disease caused by bacteria called Mycobacterium tuberculosis, infects an estimated nearly one third of the world population has latent tuberculosis infection, as it has been documented according to the World Health Organization. The emergence of multidrug resistant varieties of Mycobacterium tuberculosis has led to a search for novel drug targets. We have perfo...

A large portion of the coding capacity of Mycobacterium tuberculosis is devoted to the production of proteins containing several copies of the pentapeptide-2 repeat, namely the PE/PPE_MPTR proteins. Protein domain repeats have a variety of binding properties and are involved in protein-protein interactions as well as binding to other ligands such as DNA and RNA. They are not as common in prokar...

UNLABELLED Mycobacterial evolution involves various processes, such as genome reduction, gene cooption, and critical gene acquisition. Our comparative genome size analysis of 44 mycobacterial genomes revealed that the nonpathogenic (NP) genomes were bigger than those of opportunistic (OP) or totally pathogenic (TP) mycobacteria, with the TP genomes being smaller yet variable in size--their geno...