Scientists from the University of British Columbia have taken a crucial step towards starving out tuberculosis, following research into how the infection grows in the body.
Tuberculosis, a bacterial infection which generally affects the lungs, is a global threat; worldwide, it kills more people than HIV and malaria combined. In Canada, there are around 1,600 new cases of tuberculosis reported every year, with about 20 per cent of those cases affecting First Nations peoples, according to the Government of Canada. Researchers using the Canadian Light Source have investigated how the bacteria grow in lungs in an effort to better understand how tuberculosis can be treated.
Lindsay Eltis, a UBC professor of Microbiology and Immunology and Canada Research Chair in Microbial Catabolism and Biocatalysis, has spent the last 25 years studying bacteria and determining how they grow on different compounds. In 2007, Eltis’ group discovered that tuberculosis bacteria grow on cholesterol and that this is important for causing disease.
“Many bacteria, like humans, grow using glucose, a type of sugar. They derive energy from it, converting it to water and carbon dioxide, and use it to make building blocks essential to life. The tuberculosis bacterium is a bit unusual in that it can grow on cholesterol, deriving energy and essential building blocks from it,” explains Eltis. “This ability to grow on cholesterol helps the bacterium establish infection in our lungs.”
>Read more on the Canadian Light Source website
Image: Crystal structure of the newly imaged carbon-ring cleaving enzyme from the tuberculosis bacterium, IpdABMtb.
Credit: Lindsay Eltis