Transcriptional profiling mycobacterium tuberculosis from patient sputa

The emergence of drug resistance threatens to destroy tuberculosis control programmes worldwide, with resistance to all first-line drugs and most second-line drugs detected. Drug tolerance (or phenotypic drug resistance) is also likely to be clinically relevant over the 6-month long standard treatment for drug-sensitive tuberculosis. Transcriptional profiling the response of Mycobacterium tuberculosis to antimicrobial drugs offers a novel interpretation of drug efficacy and mycobacterial drug-susceptibility that likely varies in dynamic microenvironments, such as the lung. This chapter describes the non-invasive sampling of tuberculous sputa and techniques for mRNA profiling M.tb bacilli during patient therapy to characterise real-world drug actions.