A new paper with Lindsay Sonnenkalb as first-author has just been published in The Lancet Microbe. It is a collaboration between a number of groups, led by Stefan Niemann and in it we evolved resistance to bedaquiline in vitro. Sequencing revealed 265 genetic variants with 250 affecting Rv0678, which is the transcription regulator of mmpL5, […]
Category: clinical microbiology
Fluoroquinolones are used to treat both normal and drug resistant tuberculosis and therefore being able to work out if an infection is resistant or not to fluoroquinolones is very important. Sequencing the genome of an infection is increasingly used to rapidly return which antibiotics could be used to treat a patient with tuberculosis. Genetics-based approaches […]
The large and comprehensive dataset of clinical tuberculosis isolates collected by the CRyPTIC project is described in detail by this paper, just published in PLoS Biology. Each isolate was whole genome sequenced and had its minimum inhibitory concentration to 13 different antibiotics measured using a bespoke 96-well broth microdilution plate. Alice Brankin, along with Kerri […]
Since the primary goal of CRyPTIC was to map the genetic variants in M. tuberculosis associated with resistance to different antibiotics, this genome-wide association study is one of the key research outputs of the project. It brings together all the samples with genetic and drug susceptibility testing (DST) data and therefore relies on all the […]
Yesterday eLife published the first paper from our citizen science project, BashTheBug, which was launched in April 2017 on the Zooniverse platform. (Update on 19 July 2022: the final formatted version of the paper has been posted on eLife). Through BashTheBug we asked for volunteers to classify images of M. tuberculosis growing on a range […]
ReadItAndKeep is a new human-read decontamination algorithm that works by mapping the reads in a FASTQ file to the reference SARS-CoV-2 genome. This works because SARS-CoV-2 genetic variation is not so high as to lead to reads being incorrectly discarded and means the algorithm, which relies on minimap2, is both fast and has a low […]