What is it about?
We looked at how the expression of genes changes in tuberculosis patients. This is not new, but we wanted to select as few genes as possible to tell apart the tuberculosis patients from other individuals. It turned out that four genes are sufficient for this purpose.
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Why is it important?
Tuberculosis is a global threat – almost 1/3 of the world's population is infected with the bacterium causing the disease. An infected person has a 10% chance of developing disease in her or his lifetime. However, since so many are infected, the disease kills over a million people each year. Rapid diagnosis of tuberculosis is very important to control the spread of the disease, and we hope that by looking at what is happening to the patient on a molecular level we can speed up the diagnosis.
Perspectives
Previous publications have been showing hundreds of genes as necessary to tell tuberculosis apart. Here, we demonstrate that only a handful of genes is sufficient to discriminate tuberculosis.
Dr January 3rd Weiner
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Concise gene signature for point-of-care classification of tuberculosis, EMBO Molecular Medicine, December 2015, EMBO,
DOI: 10.15252/emmm.201505790.
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