M. tuberculosis survival under carbon-starved conditions

FEBRUARY 2006

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.

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