House of cellulose – a new hideout for drug tolerant Mycobacterium tuberculosis
Authors:Ashwani Kumar
doi: 10.15698/mic2016.07.515
Volume 3, pp. 299 to 301, published 23/06/2016.
Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, Institute of Microbial Technology, Sector 39 A, Chandigarh 160036, India.
Keywords:
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, biofilms, cellulose, drug tolerance, thiol reductive stress, extracellular polymeric substance.
Corresponding Author(s):
Conflict of interest statement:
The author declares that there are no competing financial or other interests that might influence the matters discussed in this article.
Please cite this article as:
Ashwani Kumar (2016). House of cellulose - a new hideout for drug tolerant Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Microbial Cell3(7): 299-301. doi: 10.15698/mic2016.07.515
© 2016 Kumar. This is an open-access article released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which allows the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are acknowledged.
Abstract:
Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) causes tuberculosis (TB). The treatment of TB requires administration of multiple drugs for long durations because of the unusual drug tolerance of Mtb. The phenotypic drug tolerance of genetically drug-susceptible Mtb in humans can be explained by its ability to form biofilms. Recent studies from different laboratories suggest that Mtb forms biofilms that harbour drug-tolerant bacteria. These findings have created a new area of research in the field of mycobacterial physiology. Recently, my laboratory has reported that Mtb cells organise themselves into biofilms in response to intracellular thiol reductive stress (Trivedi et al. Nature communications. 2016). Bacteria residing in these biofilms are tolerant towards antimycobacterial drugs. Cellulose is a key component of the extracellular polymeric substances that hold mycobacterial cells together in these biofilms. Here, I discuss the implications of these findings and new hypotheses arising from this study on the biology of Mtb biofilms.