Deciphering the biology of Mycobacterium tuberculosis from the complete genome sequence

Nature. 1998 Jun 11;393(6685):537-44. doi: 10.1038/31159.

S T Cole ¹, R Brosch, J Parkhill, T Garnier, C Churcher, D Harris, S V Gordon, K Eiglmeier, S Gas, C E Barry 3rd, F Tekaia, K Badcock, D Basham, D Brown, T Chillingworth, R Connor, R Davies, K Devlin, T Feltwell, S Gentles, N Hamlin, S Holroyd, T Hornsby, K Jagels, A Krogh, J McLean, S Moule, L Murphy, K Oliver, J Osborne, M A Quail, M A Rajandream, J Rogers, S Rutter, K Seeger, J Skelton, R Squares, S Squares, J E Sulston, K Taylor, S Whitehead, B G Barrell

Affiliations

Affiliation

1 Sanger Centre, Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Hinxton, UK. stcole@pasteur.fr

PMID: 9634230 DOI: 10.1038/31159

Abstract

Countless millions of people have died from tuberculosis, a chronic infectious disease caused by the tubercle bacillus. The complete genome sequence of the best-characterized strain of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, H37Rv, has been determined and analysed in order to improve our understanding of the biology of this slow-growing pathogen and to help the conception of new prophylactic and therapeutic interventions. The genome comprises 4,411,529 base pairs, contains around 4,000 genes, and has a very high guanine + cytosine content that is reflected in the biased amino-acid content of the proteins. M. tuberculosis differs radically from Other bacteria in that a very large portion of its coding capacity is devoted to the production of Enzymes involved in lipogenesis and lipolysis, and to two new families of glycine-rich proteins with a repetitive structure that may represent a source of antigenic variation.

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