Technologies

Tuberculosis is a serious and lethal infectious disease that exists worldwide. There is a recognized need to understand the infectivity mechanisms used by mycobacterium to identify useful therapeutic and prophylactic targets. JHU researchers have generated a near-comprehensive library of over a thousand genotypically defined M. tuberculosis mutants. The library was made using high throughput transposon-mediated random insertion mutagenesis. This collection of mycobacterium mutants provides a vast resource of defined mutants that has not been previously available. Mutation sites have been genetically mapped and defined to provide a valuable resource for clinical, pharmaceutical and basic science research. JHU scientists have also developed custom microarrays to probe to track the presence or absence of the mutants during experimentation.

JHU researchers have generated a library of 1,183 genotypically defined Mycobacterium tuberculosis mutants using transposon-mediated random insertion mutagenesis. The transposon used to generate the library, Himar1, has a small but defined target site allowing the disruption of nearly all open reading frames, and a genetic map of the exact mutation sites has been compiled. In addition, custom microarrays have been developed to probe for the presence or absence of each mutant.