Tuberculosis, or TB, is a bacterial infection of the lungs that can be fatal. The World Health Organization estimates 1.5 million people died of the disease worldwide in 2020. It remains a persistent foe in large part because the bacteria can mutate and evolve to develop resistance to our antibiotics (often within a patient, which can lead to relapse).

Now, in a pair of studies published this week in PLoS Biology, scientists have found an array of new genes associated with that drug resistance, hinting at how we might battle the disease going forward.

The researchers analyzed bacterial samples from more than 12,000 patients across Asia, Africa, South America and Europe, examining their resistance to 13 first- and second-line antibiotics — a "comprehensive [analysis] of the genetic variation in the bacteria" that cause tuberculosis, says Zamin Iqbal, a computational biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's European Bioinformatics Institute and co-author of the two studies.

Read more...