Tetsuro Nishida Department of Internal Medicine, School of Medicine, Shinshu University (Prof.: Tadamasa Tozuka) In 60 cases of pulmonary tuberculosis treated with artificial pneumoperitoneum or with combination of pneumoperitoneum and chemotherapy, the relation between plasma protein fractions and clinical pictures was investigated, and following results were obtained. 1) In the plasma protein...

The elucidation of the genomic sequence of Mycobacterium tuberculosis revealed the presence of a novel multigene family designated PE/PE_PGRS that encodes numerous, highly related proteins of unknown function. In this study, we demonstrate that a transposon insertion in a PE_PGRS gene (1818(PE_PGRS)) found in Mycobacterium bovis BCG Pasteur, which is the BCG homologue of the M. tuberculosis H37...

We sequenced the genome of Mycobacterium tuberculosis strain MT11, which exhibits a specific 16S rRNA gene mutation found in 6% of French Polynesian M. tuberculosis isolates. It comprises a 4,110,293-bp chromosome with 65.15% G+C content, and it encodes 3,949 proteins and contains 85 predicted RNA genes. The TbD1 region is absent in strain MT11 as in modern M. tuberculosis strains.

Antibacterial drug development suffers from a paucity of targets whose inhibition kills replicating and nonreplicating bacteria. The latter include phenotypically dormant cells, known as persisters, which are tolerant to many antibiotics and often contribute to failure in the treatment of chronic infections. This is nowhere more apparent than in tuberculosis caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis...

The events involved in the establishment of a latent infection with Mycobacterium tuberculosis are not fully understood, but hypoxic conditions are generally believed to be the environment encountered by the pathogen in the central part of the granuloma. The present study was undertaken to provide insight into M. tuberculosis protein expression in in vitro latency models where oxygen is deplete...

More efficacious treatment regimens are needed for tuberculosis, however, drug development is impeded by a lack of reliable biomarkers of disease severity and of treatment effect. We conducted a directed screen of host biomarkers in participants enrolled in a tuberculosis clinical trial to address this need. Serum samples from 319 protocol-correct, culture-confirmed pulmonary tuberculosis patie...

Tuberculosis (TB) remains the leading cause of death due to a single pathogen, accounting for 1.5 million deaths annually on global level. Mycobacterium tuberculosis, causative agent TB, is persistently exposed stresses such as reactive oxygen species (ROS), nitrogen (RNS), acidic conditions, starvation, and hypoxic all contributing toward inhibiting bacterial proliferation survival. Iron–sulfu...

Direct pathogen detection in blood to diagnose active tuberculosis (TB) has been difficult due to low levels of circulating antigens or due to the lack of specific, high-affinity binding reagents and reliable assays with adequate sensitivity. We sought to determine whether slow off-rate modified aptamer (SOMAmer) reagents with subnanomolar affinity for Mycobacterium tuberculosis proteins (antig...

The physiology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, the causative agent of tuberculosis, is being studied with intensity. However, despite the genomic and transcriptomic data available today, the pathogenic potential of these bacteria remains poorly understood. Therefore, proteomic approaches seem relevant in studying mycobacteria. This review covers the main stages in the proteomic analysis methods ...

HIV significantly affects the immunological environment during tuberculosis coinfection, and therefore may influence the selective landscape upon which M. tuberculosis evolves. To test this hypothesis whole genome sequences were determined for 169 South African M. tuberculosis strains from HIV-1 coinfected and uninfected individuals and analyzed using two Bayesian codon-model based selection an...