DST-NRF Centre of Excellence for Biomedical TB Research Nuggets

MARCH 2006

Research
As part of an ongoing study of the mechanisms that Mycobacterium tuberculosis uses to adapt to the various environments it encounters during the course of an infection, researchers in the Wits node of the CBTBR turned their attention to a pair of closely related M. tuberculosis genes that had been shown by others to be strongly up-regulated when the bacilli are starved for carbon. In a paper published in Tuberculosis, Bhavna Gordhan, working together with collaborators at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, showed that loss of one or both of these genes had no effect on the ability of M. tuberculosis to survive under carbon-starved conditions or to grow and cause disease in immunodeficient mice. This study provides a powerful illustration of the notion that if a gene is highly regulated one should not automatically assume that the function that it performs is indispensable.

Honours
Tow students at the Wits node of the MMRU have been awarded training fellowships for 2006/7 from the Columbia University – southern Africa Fogarty AIDS Training and Research Program. Betty Mowa will use her pre-doctoral fellowship for six months of training in animal models of TB in Dr Gilla Kaplan’s laboratory at the Public Health Research Institute in New Jersey. Limenako will be traveling to the University of Washington in Seattle in May 2006 to undertake four months of postdoctoral training in DNA microarray technology under the supervision of Dr David Sherman. Betty Mowa was also awarded a grant that will enable her and her supervisor, Valerie Mizrahi, to participate in 2006 in the Mellon Postgraduate Mentoring Scheme at Wits University.

Conferences & Workshops
Diane Kuhnert, a postdoctoral fellow at the Wits node of the CBTBR, attended the Wellcome Trust Open Door Workshop on Working with Pathogen Genomes, held at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus in Hinxton, UK, 29 January -3 February, 2006. During this workshop, Diane was able to hone her skills in the use of advanced bioinformatics tools for pathogen genome research. The impact of her training is already being felt within the Wits node, whose research program is crucially reliant upon the use of such tools.

Valerie Mizrahi presented a talk at the Biological Sciences in Africa Leadership Conference of the Africa Genome Education Institute, the Nelson Mandela Foundation & Innogen (UK), held in Somerset, 24-25 March 2006, in the session on strategies to mobilize the best brains to deal with poverty and health in Africa. The focus of her talk was on the state of health research in Africa and the associated opportunities and challenges being faced in the development, retention and utilization of high-level skills in the biosciences relevant to Africa’s health problems.

Science communication
Members of the Wits node of the CBTBR engaged extensively with the media in the run-up to World TB Day, which will be held on 24 March, 2006. Valerie Mizrahi was interviewed for a newspaper article on TB and the way the disease is being tackled locally and globally, that was published in the Star on World TB Day. Her contribution to the article focused on highlighting promising new advances in TB drug discovery and development. On the 14 March, 2006, the Wits node, led by Dr Bavesh Kana, hosted a group of fourteen journalists and two presenters from the SABC, all of whom were attending a workshop on science communication run by Marina Joubert from Southern Science. The visit kicked off with a press conference on the importance of basic TB research in South Africa. The visitors, many of whom had not been in a laboratory before, were then taken on a tour of the facilities. Thereafter, interactive demonstrations were given to encourage innovative ways to understand basic scientific concepts. Demonstrations on DNA cloning and the workings of bacterial metabolic pathways were also given. The group is expected to produce a written piece for presentation and possible publication. Many of the journalists expressed the desire to return for a further visit in the near future.

Collaboration
A recent collaboration between CBTBR and the Institute for Clinical Molecular Biology (IKMB), Christian-Albrechts University, Kiel, Germany was very fruitful.  This collaboration was established by Proff Paul van Helden and Eileen Hoal from CBTBR and Prof. Dr. Med. Stefan Schreiber from IKMB.  As part of the collaboration, Marlo Möller, an MSc student from CBTBR, joined the institute as a visiting scientist for 6 months and worked with Drs Ruta Kwiatkowski and Almut Nebel from IKMB.  The project involved host genetic susceptibility to tuberculosis (TB) and Marlo took South African DNA samples with her and genotyped candidate genes in the TB cases and healthy controls using state-of-the-art robotic equipment, molecular biology techniques and statistical analyses.  During her stay at the institute, which houses part of the German National Genotyping Platform and is a high-throughput genotyping laboratory, she was trained in the operations of the lab, whole genome amplification, various genotyping systems (TaqMan and SNPlex) and the Laboratory Information Management System used by researchers from the institute.  A preliminary indication of association with a candidate gene was found.  Because of the success of this collaboration, Marlo will return to Kiel in June for further studies.