The fight against tuberculosis lacks an important weapon: a sensitive and specific diagnostic probe for the causal bacterium, Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
Clifton Barry at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, Benjamin Davis at the University of Oxford, UK, and their co-workers have got around the problem by exploiting an enzymatic reaction that adds the sugar trehalose to the bacterium's surface lipids.
They synthesized a library of small molecules similar to trehalose and tested their ability to act as substrates in this reaction. One of these molecules, FITC-trehalose, which is fluorescent, was incorporated into the cell envelope and 'lit up' bacteria grown in its presence. FITC-trehalose also labelled M. tuberculosis living inside macrophages, a type of immune-system cell it frequently infects. The authors say that this technique could be used to follow how the bacterium infects macrophages.
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Tagging the TB bacterium. Nature 471, 139 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/471139c
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/471139c
