Comprehensive functional analysis of Mycobacterium tuberculosis toxin-antitoxin systems: implications for pathogenesis, stress responses, and evolution.

ABSTRACT: Toxin-antitoxin (TA) systems, stress-responsive genetic elements ubiquitous in microbial genomes, are unusually abundant in the major human pathogen Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Why M. tuberculosis has so many TA systems and what role they play in the unique biology of the pathogen is unknown. To address these questions, we have taken a comprehensive approach to identify and functionally characterize all the TA systems encoded in the M. tuberculosis genome. Here we show that 88 putative TA system candidates are present in M. tuberculosis, considerably more than previously thought. Comparative genomic analysis revealed that the vast majority of these systems are conserved in the M. tuberculosis complex (MTBC), but largely absent from other mycobacteria, including close relatives of M. tuberc

SUBMITTER: Ramage HR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2781298 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature