COMPARATIVE EXPRESSION PROFILING OF MYCOBACTERIUM BOVIS STRAINS WITH VARIABLE VIRULENCE.

BLANCO F,; NUÑEZ-GARCIA J,; GARCIA-PELAYO C,; SORIA M,; ZUMARRAGA M,; CATALDI A,; GORDON S,,; BIGI F

Mar del PLata

Congreso; XLIII Reunión Anual Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Bioquímica y Biología Molecular.; 2007

    Bovine tuberculosis (TBB) remains an important animal and zoonotic disease in many countries of the world causing significant economical losses and a public health hazard. Mycobacterium bovis, the causative agent of TBB, is closely related to M. tuberculosis, the agent of humanTB. A range of different global techniques for identifying large numbers of genes that are related with virulence has been applied since last years. Among these techniques, DNA microarray analysis has been applied to defining the repertoire of genes expressed in macrophages infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis.To extend the repertoire of these virulence related genes we therefore undertook a whole transcriptomic microarray analysis of M. bovis. We compared the expression profile of a M. bovis strain that haved showed a hipervirulent phenotype in mice with that of an attenuated strain. We found that during in vitro culture condition, the expression of Rv3496 and Rv3681 was upregulated in the hipervirulent strain while the expression of Rv3249, Rv3251 and Rv1048 was upregulated in the attenuated strain. These genes encoded probable transcriptional regulatory proteins, virulence-related gene and genes involved in fatty acid metabolic process.